Twitter Vote Report: New York Among Longest Waits

Twitter Vote Report, a site that is aggregating voter experiences and problems at polling stations across the country, has been collecting voter tweets on Twitter, call-ins and text messages this morning and afternoon. And, surprise! New York is ranking some of the top wait times in the country.

Results are changing in real time (and the site is having high-volume traffic issues) but some tweets from New York are logging in wait times up to 180 minutes in the Downtown Brooklyn area.

Check out these dispatches:

To submit a report, users can use their cellphone, by texting 66937 and starting their message with "#votereport." Or they can post on their Twitter account, tag it "#votereport" and add other information to signify their zip code (#48823) and context (#wait:[minutes], #good, #bad, #early). iPhone users can download the Twitter Vote Report app too.

"The hard truth is that so many of the problems that crop up on Election Day slip through the cracks or only get looked at on the day after Election Day," Nancy Scola, associate editor at the Personal Democracy Forum's techPresident blog, and one of the project's founders, told The American Prospect. This project leaves the tracking in the hands of the people, not advocacy groups or larger media organizations. "With Twitter, we can decentralize things so that people can help other people work out their own problems with voting," she said.

Twitter Vote Report was inspired by a blog post on techPresident.com on Oct. 6, proposing Twitter as a platform to monitor the election. For the past month, volunteer developers have been furiously coding to get www.twittervotereport.com online. On Oct. 29, cheeky news site Rocketboom attended a "coding party" at Williamsburg's Change You Want to See Gallery and took a video of the scene.