My Wrongest Post of 2008: A Transparent Disaster

I take pride in not only admitting mistakes, but making them. In fact, I carry this old [paper!] news clipping in my wallet:

“If you’re not failing enough, you’re not trying hard enough,” said Richard Holden, product manager for Google’s Adwords service. . .”The stigma [for failure] is less [at Google] because we staff projects leanly and encourage them to just move, move, move. If it doesn’t work, move on.”

And so I’m here to call direct attention to my most dead-from-the-neck-up incorrect, thoroughly wrong-headed post of 2008: “Election08: A Transparent Disaster.”

In it I argued that, due to the proliferation of social media tools that allow people to create and publish videos, pictures and brief text reports of goings-on at the polls on election day, the election would collapse under the weight of all that citizen reportage. It would tie up results in some places for weeks, I argued.

I forecast this with the nuanced prose style I have been honing my entire life. Wrote I:

I predict a paralyzing info hell as a rickety, distributed, incoherent, often incompetent, long-invisible voting system is exposed to the harsh light of Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, FaceBook, iReports, youReports, themReports, cell photos, almost-real-time blog postings and whatever self-interested data-motes are broadcast by, um, legit journalists on the national networks on TV and online.

I predict legal intervention, litigation and a long postponement of official results.

As anyone who has not been sequestered in a warehouse full of Minnesota ballots for the past two months knows, none of the above came to pass. Not even close.

The two biggest efforts, in fact, suggest that the proliferation of those tools made the election more efficient, not less.

Problems were captured and reported on by CNN. But in many cases it appears the problems were reported in local election officials who actually may have responded to correct, control or at least explain the problems.

Ditto a big effort called Twitter Vote Report, an initiative sponsored by a bunch of large (though mostly progressive) organizations.

In no case could I find an example of the reports being used to dispute  results. I remain surprised. After so many reports of voter intimidation and official incompetence in 2000 in Florida, I couldn’t imagine how those alleged events would not have been captured in real time and the data used to litigate close elections.

Even the recount of the extremely close Senate election between comedians Norm Coleman and Al Franken has been handled with such admirable transparency that no question of election day mischief has come into play.

So: Mea culpa. Mea freakin’ culpa. I was wrong.

I would vouch that I’ll be careful not to repeat that kind of transparent blogging disaster in 2009. But that itself would be another blatant mistake.

After all, if I don’t fail enough, that would mean I’m not trying hard enough.