Picture Yourself Voting

Don't forget your camera when you head out to the polls November 7.

AIGA, the professional association for designers, has launched the Polling Place Photo Project, which provides a platform to which voters across the country can upload images of their voting location.

Touted as "a research tool on how voting happens in America and how it can be designed to be easier, less confusing and more enjoyable," the project deliberately eschews political ties or even any overt ambition to record or discourage the kind of voting fraud many fear will prevail in this year's election.

What the project does hope to achieve is a comprehensive database of "every polling place in America," no matter how small, where each photo is accompanied by information contributed by the photographer on the state, polling place, ballot type, and quality of service. Photographers can contribute up to five images at a time, along with tags and suggestions for improvements, on the site's simple browse/upload page. 

While the PPP Project seems to sidestep its abuse oversight potential, there are numerous other projects that are not so apolitical, as demonstrated by a useful list at Jay Rosen's NewAssignment.Net (Rosen consulted on the project). This includes several citizen journalism experiments to collect visual information on the propaganda voters are subject to, problematic polling places, and GOTV efforts.

It obviously remains to be seen if projects like these will be reliable or expansive enough to provide a significant remedy to the (at best) confusion and (at worst) corruption that continues to permeate our voting system, but there is something reassuringly populist about involving the average Joe in supervising a system that has almost eternally been misused by those with the most power.

And we can see that major news organizations such as BBC and CNN (links via NewAssignment.Net) seem to think there is potential in this phenomenon, as demonstrated by their calls for aspiring citizen journalists to share their voting experiences "from the ground." I'm inclined to agree with them.

Besides making voter fraud a more visible problem, these efforts have the added benefit of involving citizens in two fundamentals of democracy they have felt increasingly disenchanted by and disenfranchised from: the electoral process and the media. After all, what better way to help people get past the problems inherent in both, than by allowing them to take part in remedying them?

--Miki Johnson

 

P.S. Thanks to Jen Bekman over at Personism.com for the tip!

(Photo: By Lawrence Mullen; Courtesy Polling Place Photo Project)