We're entirely pleased to announce that Twitter Vote Report is now off the ground and unleashed upon the Internet, with the launch of an actual site at TwitterVoteReport.com.

Now, that "beta" badge is there for a reason. There are, by all means, plenty of kinks to work out in the next few days. But much has been accomplished and in just a few weeks. The site's up, for one thing. The integrated feed of Twitter tweets and SMS messages seems to be flowing, for another. Perhaps most importantly, real live people are actually using the #votereport hashtag to mark their voting experiences on Twitter.

In the two weeks since we first proposed using Twitter to report election day problems and challenges, both the response to the idea and how it has evolved has been, frankly, remarkable. The established groups who work in election protection have been amazingly receptive to the adoption of an open format for vote reporting, eager to benefit from a combined effort. And a collection of excellent developers and activists are at work building out the protocol and tools for making the most of the resulting data. While work on the project is pretty fluid, we're going to give you an update on where things stand today.