Monitoring Elections

A coworker, Dave Moore, suggested at lunch today a great way to improve election monitoring: Have volunteers from each party stand outside every polling place with a camcorder. Sure you'll go through a few tapes before the end of the day. Sure most of the tapes will be spectacularly boring. However, if something does go wrong you'll get a contemporaneous record of what happened. Just knowing that there will be video of any irregularities on the evening the news may keep everyone on their best behavior.

Realistically, camcorders and tapes are a bit expensive and cumbersome for this kind of project. I bet by 2008 digital cameras (which can also do video) and cell phones (which will soon be able to do video) will make it cheap and easy. Pipe the results directly to a blog and you have a wonderful way for citizens to monitor their own elections.