As of the time of this writing, this is the last tweet from the D.C. Board of Elections’ Twitter account.

As we reported earlier today, it’s been a pretty frustrating day for D.C. voters: some waited up to four hours at early voting centers to cast ballots. While some of the long lines and waits were beyond the D.C. Board of Elections’ control—turnout was high, said many precinct captains—others were perfectly within the agency’s capacities. Communicating, for one.

Throughout the day, the board’s Twitter account remained silent, saying nothing of the long waits to its 2,084 followers. The same went for the board’s Facebook page: even as some voters posted frustrated comments, the board failed to post responses or updates.

The city’s election board certainly isn’t the first agency to fail at social media when it’s needed most: earlier this year, Metro’s Twitter account offered no updates or information when trains were disabled due to a computer malfunction. Moreover, the D.C. Fire/EMS Twitter account, once a must-follow, now operates at a fraction of the capacity that it used to.

To its credit, the elections board had other things to worry about today: namely, getting enough extra machines to early voting centers to speed the process along. But had it chosen to communicate more effectively—a simple tweet will often do it—the board could have encouraged enough voters to either push off voting until next week or head to an early voting center outside their ward, where the waits could have been shorter. More importantly, though, it could have been tipped off to problems as they emerged; plenty of the voters I saw in Ward 1 today were playing around on their phones, and many a tweet were sent in frustration.

Social media isn’t hard, and best of all, anyone can be empowered to use it. A few years ago, D.C. blogger and precinct captain Tom Bridge effectively used it to tell voters how long a wait they could expect and warn the board when problems emerged. There’s no reason the board couldn’t have put it to better use today.