Bring Your Camera to your Polling Place

On Election Day (Tuesday!), please bring a camera with you to your polling place and take some pictures of American democracy in action. Then submit your photos to the ingenious Polling Place Photo Project, which will document every one of America’s election locations through good old fashioned web-based citizen journalism.

I can’t even begin to scratch the surface of the kinds of fascinating, inspiring, and troubling things this project will potentially reveal about America’s crazy democratic process, both the good and the bad: the rogues gallery of different kinds of voting methods and machines, the long confusing lines, the aggressive party electioneers, the intimidating highway patrolmen, the hard-to-find locations… and the dedicated voters waiting as long as it takes to vote, the helpful volunteers managing the process — maybe we’ll even see some well-designed signage. Not to mention the pride in seeing the faces of American voters doing what is admittedly an inconvenient but ultimately rewarding civic obligation. I really look forward to seeing the results of this project.

To learn more, please visit the project’s official site, which has lots of helpful information about how to legally photograph your polling place and how to submit your images to the project’s web site.

Oh, and while you’re hanging around your polling place taking photographs, you should vote. Probably for a Democrat. Unless you live in Vermont’s Windham-2, in which case you should vote Progressive. Thank you!