Asheville’s social media community is tweeting all about today’s Asheville City Council primary election. You can participate, too, if you’re on Twitter.
Meantime, you can watch what people are saying by going to www.mountainx.com and checking out the special section at the top of the homepage. You can also check out http://ashevillemedia.com/, a community site hosted by Jose Ibarra of Applied Solutions Group. Jose has turned the ashevillemedia site over to all tweets tagged #avlelect.
There’s great information, like how to find your polling place, being posted, alongside what people are seeing at the polls and what people are saying about the candidates.
Very cool.
4 Comments
Agree completely, which is why we leaned on automated calling (tree-free) and radio for most of the campaign, and printed our own yard signs two-up on standard blanks – so cut in half the environmental impact per sign.
The real key to greening our elections is campaign finance reform. If the Chapel Hill experiment goes well this year, I want to give Asheville voters the opportunity to vote in a referendum on public financing here. If all candidates were limited to a few thousand dollars (number to be determined) there would be far fewer mailers and yard signs. But absent financial restraint, all candidates are forced to seek votes through advertising instead of through voter education by the media.
Of course, the media rake in much of the cash spent on elections, so they are not inclined to favor meaningful campaign finance reform.
Thank you GreenAsheville, that is so true. Got to be greener then the next person while wasting paper for that crap.
"what if they gave an election and nobody came to vote" – Richie Havens
Just think of all the money wasted and trees that were destroyed for all those glossy mailings and yard signs – all for about a hundred votes for each candidate. All the while they constantly drop words like "green" and "sustainable" and try to make people feel guilty for not riding the God-awful bus, etc., etc.,. What a frigging joke!
Be careful ….. the Feds arrested folks from Pittsburgh (at the G20 summit) and charged them with conspiracy (and other offenses) because they used their twitter accounts to tell protesters which roads were blocked by the cops and where the police where located, where the roads were blocked etc. …. and because of the number of people involved it is considered (at least by the officials) as a conspiracy to "hinder law enforcement"!
They also confiscated a sling shot from one guys hotel room that was doing the "tweeting". (I guess it is a weapon of mass destruction).
I see it as a case where the police/feds haven’t figured out how to "tweet" and are mad that the protesters "out-foxed" them…. even though the "tweeters" used a police scanner to listen to the cops’ plans because it was broadcast over open airwaves…..