YouTube is encouraging its users to “video their vote” on election day on Tuesday, just as they did back in 2008. The idea is not about recording video of you casting your vote, to be clear, but is rather an opportunity for some first-hand, citizen journalism about the voting experience at your local polling place. → Read More
Better late than never. With less than two weeks to go before the U.S. presidential election on November 6, Microsoft’s Bing just unveiled Bing Elections. The site features news results from major U.S. publications that can be filtered by political preference (right, left, center), as well as an interactive map with election results and sentiment analysis across key issues based on data from… → Read More
Google just launched a new free API that will make it easier for developers to add civic information like polling places, early vote locations, candidate data and election official information to their applications. Google says it hopes this new Google Civic Information API will “unleash the creativity of the Internet and help you build innovative products that push civic information to your… → Read More
The presidential election season in the U.S. is now in full swing and both the Democratic and Republican conventions are just a few months away. Google just announced that it will be the “official social platform and livestream provider” for the Republican convention in Tampa in August. Google promises “a convention without walls” and will use both YouTube and its Google+ social network, to… → Read More
Votizen, a new platform for connecting registered voters with elected officials, is launching the first-ever “virtual” precinct walk today, starting with San Franciscans for Jobs and Good Government, a committee supporting Ed Lee for Mayor of San Francisco. This virtual precinct walk is a modern update on traditional door-to-door campaigning, where previously, a politician’s supporters would… → Read More
This is probably a case of where the idea is sound but humans will no doubt muck everything up. Thirty-three states here in the good ol’ U.S. will allow military and overseas citizens to vote via the Internet beginning with the mid-term election in November. This is being done in part to ensure that overseas voters’ votes, you know, count. I don’t know how many of y’all have ever lived overseas… → Read More
Well this is a strange one. I just received in the mail (that’s “real” mail, not e-mail) an official letter from the National Association of Secretaries of State encouraging me to take advantage of all these fancy ways of keeping up-to-date with voting information. The letter took great pains to stress that the program, which includes e-mail and SMS alerts, doesn’t use any… → Read More
As Señor Arrington alluded to, CNN rolled out its 3D hologram-thing during its election coverage last night. Thirty-five HD cameras are filming the reporter, Jessica Yellin, which then send the images back to producers in New York. The technology was developed by these guys. (CNN’s “Magic Wall,” if you’re interested, was developed by a company called Perceptive Pixel, which was… → Read More
In addition to listening to Ron and Fez tonight, you may want to check out CNN even if Fox News is your preferred network. Why is that? Oh, just the fact that they’ll be using 3D holograms to talk to people “in-studio.” It’s just like Star Wars, the movie series that passed its sell-by date some time ago. Says USA Today, the mouthpiece of America’s third grade education… → Read More
Just a quick heads up to satellite radio listeners, Ron and Fez (noon to three) will be hosting some sort of election night extravaganza tonight starting at 7pm EST. Best of all, it’ll be on both XM and Sirius—XM channel 202 and Sirius channel 197. Of course, you could also stick to the more “traditional” POTUS (XM channel 130) for your satrad election coverage, but where’s… → Read More
My fellow Americans: tomorrow’s the big day, Election Day, wherein we are able to exercise our right to wait in line all day at a fire house or elementary school, rubbing shoulders with “neighbors” and trading pleasantries about what we think about that Obama fellow. It should be fun. Yet, our voting system stinks. Not only that, but our voting system could be vulnerable to fraud, and… → Read More
http://www.g4tv.com/lv3/34590 The upcoming downloadable content (DLC) for Mercenaries 2 has two special characters that you’ll no doubt recognize. Yes, that’s Barack Obama and Sarah Palin running around the game’s battlefields with grenades, machine guns and rocket launchers. In some of the more violent moments, Obama throws a grenade into a tank, killing a man inside and Sarah… → Read More
There’s only five days till this insufferable election ends, and one of the more interesting stories as far as we’re concerned (“we” being the tech community) was that “Obama buying Burnout ads” from a few weeks ago. Some people freaked out, others were all, “What’s the big deal? Just drive past the ads,” and others were like, “People play Burnout?” It was fun for… → Read More
Kudos to Dvice, which put together this pretty gosh darn interesting map of voting machines in the U S of A. The map shows, county by county, what type of voting machine is in use—electronic, paper, optical scan lever and punch card—and ranks them on how error prone they are. Electronic voting machines are less error prone, while punch cards—remember Florida?—are most error… → Read More
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/26610613#26610613 Remember that Election 08 iPhone app I wrote up a couple days ago? Looks like Microsoft Research has been thinking along the same lines and in honor of the voting season has unleashed some election-orientated applications for the Surface. And because of the “M” in “MSNBC,” they got a pretty extensive little segment… → Read More
Our permanent campaign marches on here in the U.S., with preparations for 2012 already well underway. To that end, some dude has asked proto-blog Slashdot what to look for when it comes to electronic vote fraud. (He’s an elections official, so he has some modicum of power to stop any shenanigans.) The suggestions are rich in thought and content. • Look for a paper trail. If… → Read More
[photopress:googletrendstide.jpg,full,left] The New Hampshire primary was yesterday, but you won’t find either winner (John McCain and Hillary Clinton) in the top 10 of Google Trends. You will, however, find a relatively unknown, sort of a long shot candidate as number two. Jimmy Tide, who not only wears the cleanest shirts but who also promises to clean up America. I’d like to see… → Read More
I’d be lying if I said that a politician’s technology policies didn’t weigh heavily into my decision whether or not to vote for him (or HER, God bless America!). Thankfully, Popular Mechanics has broken all the respective candidates science and technology policies down into bite-size digestables. The categories include Auto, Digital/Tech, Energy/Climate, Environment, Gun… → Read More
First, a disclaimer that I neither support nor oppose any particular candidate blah, blah, blah, here’s something interesting. Barack Obama’s technology plan includes the creation of a Chief Technology Officer position that "would ensure government officials holds open meetings, broadcast live webcasts of those meetings, and use blogging software, wikis and open comments to… → Read More
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