I was glad to go food shopping this morning because it was great to be out in the world (as opposed to on campus) and see the “I Voted” stickers on everybody. There has been a palpable sense of excitement and anticipation among (nearly) everyone i’ve spoken to for the last week, but I think it’s hard to evade those feelings today. The Times has some great interactive features on its site, but its election day version of we feel fine is the perfect feature for today.
NYT Emotions Tracker
It will be interesting to watch this develop throughout the day. I’m definitely feeling a lot of those things in blue.
On the way to the store this morning I must have passed 5 polling places in this non-swing state. I wish those resources were deployed to a more important spot (Florida perhaps). I’m obviously not in favor of the conditions that force voters to wait in 6 hour long lines, but all the same it’s inspiring to see footage of people engaged in our democracy.
More to come throughout the day. I don’t know how I’m going to sit through class.
It’s rare to see the mainstream media’s pundits really demystify the hidden political motives behind “neutral,” technical, state decisions. Six-hour long voting queues in south Florida, which evoke images of a developing nation’s democracy, are not failures of preparation. They are class- and race-conscious attempts at disenfranchisement. Rachel Maddow, MSNBC’s new post-Matthews counterpart to Kieth Olbermann, correctly identified these motives on her show last night:
This is an example of responsible journalism about an issue that can easily be supplied with an alibi. Here, Maddow reinscribes voting rights within the broader social context, reading the ideology behind these “technical choices.” Critiquing the alleged “objectivity” of the humble social servants at election boards nationwide is the only way to defend against the next Katherine Harris.
In his life-long project to read ideology, Althusser’s most powerful rhetorical moments are his exposures of ideology in the common features of our rythmes de vie. In Marx In His Limits, Althusser actively demystifies the motivations behind supposedly “technical decisions”:
Those who assist the ministers and government in coming to a decision that is ultimately taken by all the political personnel of the state make no bones about the fact that several different ‘technical solutions’ exist, but that a political choice always comes into play, so that only one solution wins out. It is then justified by bogus ‘technical’ arguments, notwithstanding its profoundly political nature…. Class struggle does not take place in the sky. It begins with exploitation… in matter. The matter of factory buildings, machines, energy, raw materials, the ‘working day’ the assembly line, work rhythms, and so on.
Assigning a specific (too-low) number of voting machines in a Florida library is neither a necessary nor a neutral decision. It should never be treated as one.
For all of the cheapening of information begot by the Internet, there are some really intelligent, spontaneously developed organizations using new media to try to prevent the theft of the election. Video the Vote exploits voters’ digital cameras (or cell phones) to document fraud, intimidation, technological problems, and unreasonable waits at the nation’s polling places.
This kind of decentralized news gathering should provide great evidence of what is actually happening at polling places around the country. If the media are supposed to act as a deterrent force against corruption and fraud, how will the panoptic recording of the vote affect what people (mostly on the right) are willing to do? If there are questions about the legitimacy of the election, what will the tolerance be of video of intimidation and lines preventing the foreclosed, the poor, and the nonwhite from voting? Will CNN’s iReports be able to keep up? How quickly will these videos make it into the mainstream media.
But proof after the fact can only do so much. Both parties maintain teams of lawyers ready to act quickly to prevent abuses from continuing. But this requires the kind of real time information that can make a difference during the day. A group of users at Twitter – the Internet sensation that remains the most foreign to me – put together Twitter Vote Report, a project that uses guerrilla informatics to monitor the election in real time. If the project works as deisgned, it is possible that we will hear about problems before the polls’ close locks in the decision.
But what does this mean for the media consumer? Though Election Night television is already the most must-see event of the year, this year’s mediascape will be more informed by digital citizens’ journalism than ever before. Indeed, dramatic news coverage will probably continue all day, replacing the constant replays of candidates voting with their spouses.
