You may not have noticed, but Twitter broke today.
Three times.
That doesn’t mean we weren’t busy reporting, reading the news and building our project, but it does mean that our usual analysis of social media trends in voting rights is a little sparse today.
Still, a Virginia house cat named Scampers did receive voter registration material today, which fits with our post from Tuesday on the dead dog in Virginia. The story didn’t get as much bounce online this morning. That could be related to the Twitter outage and the inclusion of a quote from the Voter Participation Center president who said that stories like the cat and dog items distracted from the center’s real mission.
More on the Twitter outage after these stories.
What We’ve Been Reading
“Walter Mondale, Arne Carlson: Reject voter ID measure,” (Walter Mondale and Arne Carlson, 06/20, Minneapolis Star-Trbune)
“Pelosi: GOP’s contempt move vs. Holder about suppressing voter rights,” (Jake Sherman, 06/21, Politico)
“UPDATE: Governor vetoes four bills, including voter ID,” (Mike Cousineau, 06/20, New Hampshire Union Leader)
“Why sloppy drafting will kill the photo ID amendment,” (David Schultz, 06/21, MinnPost.com)
“The Real Crisis: 35% of Americans Not Registered to Vote,” (Voter Participation Center, 06/21)
“The Supreme Court Speaks, Yet DOJ Won’t Listen,” (David Almasi, 06/21, National Center for Public Policy Research)
Twitter Trends
As mentioned above, Twitter had some technical troubles today. The hour-long outage wreaked havoc on our normal Topsy.com searches, but we were able to notice an interesting spike in mentions of “voter suppression” – which is directly correlated to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s press conference on the Republican opposition to Attorney General Eric Holder.
The California representative accused the Republican Party of using a contempt vote to distract Holder from his attempt to battle voter suppression. Voter suppression is used more infrequently than our more general search terms (“voting rights,” “voter ID” and the charged “voter fraud”), so it was fascinating to see the sharp spike in mentions.
We’ll keep tabs on how long that mention lasts, so follow @WhoCanVote.