A work in progress ... please help fill in the blanks and evolve it!

Goal

provide data from grassroots monitoring of election information, useful to election protection workers, voters, media, and others

Priorities

???

define simple protocol for reporting over Twitter
develop visualizations applications for several scenarios (using a "Jam Session" to catalyze)
partner with other election protection groups, e.g. 1866-OUR-VOTE, League of Younger Voters, Rock the Vote, Voter Suppression Wiki, etc., to get broad participation in creating the project -- as well as (hopefully) plenty of participants
use snazzy technology, web-2.0-buzzword-enabled approach, and "grassroots activists helping save democracy" narrative to catch media attention
combine volunteer Sweepers and "SuperTweeters" with automated analysis and visualization technologies

Note: we also want to capture as much information as possible about early voting between now and Nov. 4.

General strategy:

Blogger conference call: At some point we should hold a conference call with interested bloggers to walk them through the project. The Election Protection Coalition has offered to do some outreach and logisitics for it.
Press release: There should probably be a standard press release that goes out through the usual channels.

Outreach:

Potential targets: tech press (Wired, tech bloggers), political press (Washington Post, New York Times, political bloggers on right and left)
Potential hooks:
- The progressive angle: how activists, programmers, established organizations, and others have worked together in a decentralized way to make this happen, and quickly
- The tech angle: modern mobile activism using tools that weren't available until recently; the wonders and challenges of open format and decentralization?
- Other, more specific hooks: Credo making text messaging free for election day?
Coordinate with partners also doing PR and highlight the overall "working together for election protection" narrative

This space for rent.

# of voters: 122,000,000 in 2004, at least 75,000,000 on election day.
- if we get 1% involved, that's at least 750,000 messages
# polling places in the US: ? ideally we'd have messages hourly from each one (to get an idea of wait times), so multiple this by 8 for the number of messages; and this is also the number of people we need to get involved
# incidents reported to 866-OUR-VOTE in 2004: 42,841 (including primaries, I think). Conclusion: most incidents go unreported. what percentage of these need additional investigation?
# provisional ballots: 2,000,000 ? (based on Wikipedia's "at least 1.9 million" in 2004). if we're shooting for 10% coverage of problems, that'd be 200,000 messages.
#twitter users: 1,600,000 M, estimates that 20-30% are active, so we're drawing from a pool of 300-500,000.
- estimate needed to get decent coverage at the precinct level?
- estimate needed to get decent coverage at the county level?