Simon Owens was kind enough to email and pass this tip along:

I remember reading your post the other day mentioning the Voter Suppression Wiki. Over the weekend I got a chance to interview Baratunde Thurston — one of the people who helped create the wiki– for an article I wrote for PBS about the multiple Web 2.0 tools citizens are using to monitor the election:

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2008/11/citizens-media-use-social-media-to-monitor-election308.html

Anyway, thought this was something you and your readers would find interesting.

And there’s certainly a lot of good stuff to review in Simon’s article…here’s the lead on his blog entry…check it out!

In a YouTube video uploaded on October 24, a husband and wife couple from Oregon sit at their kitchen table and fill out their mail-in voting ballots for the 2008 election. The wife explains to the camera that Oregon has had mail-in voting for “about the last 10 years,” and the two walk the viewer through the entire voting process, at one point announcing that Barack Obama was their “candidate of choice.”

The video was created for Video Your Vote, a joint project between PBS and YouTube that encourages citizens across the U.S. to document their own personal experiences at the voting booth by shooting and then uploading the video onto YouTube (not to be confused with Video the Vote, a similar project). The effort is just one of many examples of citizen journalists utilizing crowdsourcing and Web 2.0 tools to monitor the voting practices — and problems — from an on-the-ground perspective. The groups that are monitoring campaigns said they will help create a much more transparent voting process, and in doing so, hopefully target and solve any voting problems before it’s too late to fix them.

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