Angry Twitter Bird Followup: Alyssa Katz

[Image courtesy of alyssakatz.com]

After I posted Wednesday’s blog (“Angry Twitter Birds“) on the impact of social media, I got a nice reply from Alyssa Katz, the New York City author/editor whose Tweet was the subject of my post. Her reply was so thoughtful that I asked – and she gave – permission for me to reprint it here.

I enjoyed your post on the perverse consequences of social media squawking about poll trouble (and especially the illustration!). This week’s primary was not the first time I tweeted, and got retweeted, on the subject of troubles at my NYC polling place. Here’s my comment on primary day 2011:

Poll worker too busy davening, with tefillin, to register my card. Complete chaos at my polling station, and I was voter #7. ‪#nycvotes

Please use ‪#nycvotes‬ to report any voting issues – Board of Elections will respond right away.

I couldn’t even capture the weirdness of the moment in 140 characters.
The individual to whom I was supposed to give my card before sliding the ballot into the scanner was literally standing to the side reading from a Hebrew prayer book, wearing tefillin, which are boxes containing prayers attached to his forehead and also worn attached to a leather strap coiled along his arm. Another poll worker (and there were 16 or 17 standing in the room) had to interrupt him and ask him to do his job. As with this week’s tweet, the initial retweeters who then got picked up elsewhere were sharp NYC political reporters who have plenty of experience covering election-day glitches at the polls in NYC.

BTW both of these experiences took place at extremely low turnout elections, at which the poll workers literally had no other voters to deal with besides me. My November tweet got excess attention because some assumed that I was writing about the special election for Anthony Weiner’s district, which is nearby; I was actually voting in a judicial primary.

I agree with your view that the practice of using social media to field complaints ends up disseminating a disproportionate number of negative views, of elections as much as airlines or restaurants. It’s a subset of the larger problem of negative journalism overshadowing positive stories. For instance, I did not tweet about the time that Board of Elections supervisors at my request spoke to the huge and intimidating ex-cop security guard at my building complex who told electioneers to stop distributing literature on the street corner in front of his booth, even though they were well within the free speech zone under NY law. (Maybe because that’s a hard thing to explain in a
tweet!)

But you’ll be encouraged to know that after the incident last November I resolved to make it a practice to tweet following every vote I make to describe the experience, and when I have a positive experience that’s what will show up in my Twitter feed. Just don’t expect it to get retweeted by reporters from Politico or the Washington Post.

Thanks, Alyssa!