Advokit is an open-source grassroots-network voter-file campaign-management tool developed by veterans of the Dean primary campaign and available either as a hosted (ASP) service or as a stand-alone install.

What is it with Republicans confusing .coms and .orgs? The GeorgeWBush.org parody site gets a lot of misdirected mail at their catchall address. Amidst the chaff were the occasional strategic or informative message sent to ad-hoc cc lists of Republican operatives, including a few that discuss out-of-compliance local campaign organizations and, most telling, a few with attached spreadsheets identifying lists of voters in a few Florida precincts.

The collection of essays now known as Extreme Democracy should appear in book form early next year, but it is coming out in serialized PDF (portadble document format) at the moment at the project's blog.

Flickr is a photo sharing social medium application for the web that enables people to tag their photos with key words and then view or even subscribe to a feed of all photos that share a given tag.

For a fly-on-the-wall view of voting today around the country, check out the page for photos tagged with 'vote' at Flickr.

Overheard on the #joho irc (chat) channel on irc.freenode.net:

akma: From #joiito -- ptorrone: Overheard in line at polling place this morning.... "I think all the ones with the white headphones are voting for Kerry"

The Open Voting Consortium (OVC) began from "a proposal to develop a pilot project in one county in California" and has spawned the voter verifiable, open-source
Electronic Voting Machine project:

The Heritage Society's Press Room policy weblog cites the new weblog of Mark Tapscott, the director of Heritage's Center for Media and Public Policy at Heritage, called Copy Desk, and and notes that his first entry speculates about whether the blogosphere will transform government in the same way it has challenged the mainstream media (also known as the MSM in blogger, especially right-wing blogger, circles).

His opinion on this matter is fairly straightforward:

My answer is an enthusiastic yes and my purpose with this blog is to do whatever I can to encourage this revolutionary process forward.

In Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall discusses reforming the way bills are passed in Congress without adequate review.

TPM readers suggested that blogs and their readers be harnessed to comb through future bills to uncover whatever foolish, nefarious or simply unconscionable provisions might be lurking inside them.

At first, as I said, though the intention seemed admirable, I wasn't particularly impressed by this idea. But over a few days, as I considered it further, it occurred to me that maybe I was the one who wasn't being realistic or rather was too stuck in conventional ways of thinking.....

Democrats are already pushing for a return to the observance of the rule which mandated that members of congress must be given at least three days to review legislation in its final form before it was called to a vote.

But why stop there? ...

The details of the deal aren't clear, but it looks like the path may still be open for the city of Philadelphia to offer cheap or free broadband access to its residents, to the consternation of Verizon, Comcast and other private companies. But, as the Washington Post's Cynthia Webb reports, the telecom lobby may have given up a little in this battle, but it's winning the war.

The final tally is still being compiled, but Evan Tracy of CMAG released his preliminary analysis of cross-media spending during the 2004 campaign at the 5th Annual eVoter Institute Conference this week. You can read some of the results in the latest CMAG Findings Memo.

According to Tracy, over $1.75 billion was spent this year across all media -- television, radio, print, and online. The campaigns accounted for 48% of the total and the parties picked up 27%. The remaining 25% was spent on local races and ballot initiatives.

Despite tremendous growth over 2000, online spending hardly made a dent:

Television - 91.2%
Radio - 5.1%
Newspaper - 2.9%
Internet - .9%

Perhaps more important than the actual amount spent was an understanding of why so little was allocated to the web. The consensus: old white men. The group agreed that until older traditional political consultants retire, television will remain the most important -- and for many, the only -- medium that matters. Looks like we've got our work cut out for us.