Angry Twitter Birds: Unhappy NYC Voter Demonstrates Power, Reach of Social Media
[Image courtesy of JNS]
It was primary day yesterday in four states – Colorado, New York, Oklahoma and Utah – and as I usually do I used Twitter to follow how things were going.
More and more, you’re seeing election offices assigning hashtags or dedicated Twitter handles to voting. These tools are designed to be one way for voters to alert election officials – and one another – about what’s going on at the polls.
These same tools, however, give individual voters a tremendous opportunity to spotlight and broadcast problems in a way that is unprecedented.
This was made very clear to me Tuesday morning when I searched #NYCVotes for updates on the City’s primary and saw the following Tweet by New York World editor Alyssa Katz time-stamped 7:56am –
@alykatzz Poll worker gave me a GOP primary ballot even though I’m a Dem. No pens at voting booths. Welcome to #ny09. #nycvotes
Obviously, that experience standing alone is unfortunate and definitely one which the City Board of Elections will want to address after Election Day.
It didn’t stand alone, though.
Over the next three hours, Katz’ message was re-Tweeted by ten more people from across the country. In that time, a single customer service failure affecting one voter reached an audience of thousands.
To be fair, that incident appears to have been reasonably isolated – I saw a few more complaints, but nothing to suggest widespread confusion – but to those ten people and their followers the impression one gets (fair or not) is of an election system that isn’t working.
It’s not like the City is deaf to voters; indeed, they’re launching a voting experience survey in all City taxicabs over the next week, which is remarkable (and I’d love to see the results). But that willingness to listen inevitably brings with it an invitation to complain.
The lesson for election officials is simple: in this day and age, voters’ experiences – especially negative ones – are going to be magnified and multiplied via social media whether or not officials invite the criticism. Arguing that problems are isolated or overblown, even if that’s true, won’t matter. It’s simply the new reality.
That kind of scrutiny creates a pressure for elections to be perfect. Since we know that never happens – too many moving parts and too much human imperfection involved – the goal should be to minimize opportunities for imperfection and acknowledge that failures (more than successes) are likely to get wider airplay.
In the past, problems at the polling place were likely to affect the voter and anyone else near enough to see or hear the problem occur. Today, anyone with access to social media is potentially within earshot; the challenge is give them something positive to say – or deliver a “no surprises” experience that meets expectations and thus isn’t even worthy of comment.
Even on social media, sometimes silence is golden.