Android app

[virusdave]

Android app

Functionality:

• Capture Identity (local google account & phone number)
• Record events that happen, timestamped and location stamped
  • Queueing to vote
  • Completed Voting
  • Turned away from voting
  • Observed delays in voting
  • Observed protestors or agitators
  • Observed intimidation
  • Voter roll problems
• Capture Audio & optional Video into local ring buffer (180 seconds?).
• Quick push-to-stream, which will post the ring buffer contents and live stream to some cloud location (shared-by-URL youtube stream?) and submit the URL to backends
• When live streaming, push-to-alert button for local media, election watchdogs, and/or law enforcement in case of violence or voter intimidation occurring.

[gubatron]

I've already acquired several domains which will go nicely with this, such as FreeAndFair.live (for the live web-based map), FreeAndFairUSA.com & FreeAndFairUSA.vote & FreeAndFairVote.us & FreeAndFairVoting.us

I imagine the idea with this project is that it's not just for 2020 pres. elections., which makes me think that there needs to be a context for these events which can be deduced by the android app by sending the user location when a session is started. Given GPS coordinates and date, backend should be able to deduce what election the user is participating in, I'm thinking now mostly about local elections that do not happen all over the country at the same time.

The user shouldn't really be bothered about this, the app should figure it out talking to the backend.

If there are elections in New York but I'm in Denver and local elections aren't until next week, I should get an impaired UI because there are no elections near me.

However I should be able to see what elections are ongoing in case I want to monitor what's happening.

This also makes me wonder if it'd make sense to tie twitter activity to an election with several irregularity reports.

[gubatron]

Just had a conversation about this app, and perhaps it's way out of scope, but it'd be really cool to also have an Exit Poll feature, perhaps there's already another nonprofit API out there to integrate this quickly, I can see how this would be a lot of work if you wanted to do Exit Polling for different states and counties on some key issues.

If the app would eventually become a household name for American Politics, you bet all campaigns would be monitoring all the data coming out of it for key districts.

[virusdave]

I've thought about the auto-exit-poll quite a bit and I find myself going back and forth on it, because: 1) It would be nonscientific (self-reported) and likely to be highly misleading in results. 2) There may be varying legal issues with how & when the data can actually be reported publicly.

OTOH, it could be useful as a means of ensuring that precincts are reporting accurate data (if they say candidate X has N votes, be we see M self-reports, with M > N, calling this out to media might be helpful).

re: 2020 - indeed, once we have the basic infrastructure in place, other elections could similarly be helped. My wife suggests, for instance, that Bolivia is in desperate need of this kind of system.