The use of social media and new platforms in the U.S. races really took off during the Presidential election, with Obama being fairly Internet savvy and definitely a Crackberry addict. Other political candidates have since utilized social networking sites and new media outlets for their campaigns.

Tonight, we can keep track of news in specific regions on Twitter, with hashtags such as #nycvotes; we can check out ratings on Facebook; and more.

Of course, there are some flaws. For instance, Foursquare is attempting to track users’ voting (see map).

“Check-In and include #ivoted in your shout out to get your limited edition iVOTED badge.” – Foursquare

It would seem that most people in California and New York vote but not so much between. But the reality is probably plenty of people in between are voting; they just aren’t on Foursquare…or have smart phones…or mobile technology in general…

But nevertheless, it’s a good movement. As tech enthusiast and blogger Mark Chou writes, “I love what Foursquare’s doing here. Using tech to encourage civic engagement? Check. Attractive data visualizations? Check. Next step – using Foursquare data to develop predictions more robust than exit polls!”

Haha, perhaps. Hey, if we can use these sites to predict hurricanes, why not politics. They’re pretty similar anyways.

The creators call this a “a collaborative citizen-driven election monitoring platform” and explain:

…users contribute direct SMS, email, and web reports on violations of the Election Commission’s Model Code of Conduct (PDF). The platform will then aggregate these direct reports with news reports, blog posts, photos, videos and tweets related to the elections from all relevant sources, in one place, on an interactive map.

The site is powered by two open source projects that focus on crowdsourcing information during crisis. One is Ushahidi, the other Swift, both of which I will write more about on another day.