By Nancy Scola and Allison Fine

We know. It sounds ridiculous at first. But it might not be as crazy as you think. For far too long, the job of election protection has fallen largely to lawyers schooled in election law. But there's an opportunity before us right now and through Election Day for thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of citizens to identify and rectify voting problems in real time. Enter Twitter.

The enormous number was breathtaking: six million people sent in questions through the Internet for Tom Brokaw to pose to John McCain and Barack Obama during Tuesday night's presidential town hall in Nashville. Breathtaking -- and entirely wrong; Building on what seems to be growing momentum behind using Twitter as an election protection tool, an online organizer has detailed possible standardized tags; Using donor data from ten large tech companies as a representative sample, ZDNet's Robin Harris finds that tech employees support Obama to McCain at a rate of nine to one; and much, much more.

PBS is teaming up with YouTube to put together Video Your Vote, a project that asks voters to document and share their Election Day experiences. (I'd imagine, though, that your early-voting trips to the ballot box are welcomed as well -- or, if you live in Oregon, when you, you know, lick the envelope and put your vote in the mail box.); Comedian Sarah Silverman made a splash recently with her rather dirty call for Jewish kids to haul themselves down to Florida over Columbus Day weekend and sell their grandparents on "the goodest person we've ever had as a presidential choice," known to the rest of us as Barack Obama. But did the Great Schlep amount to bupkes?; The Obama campaign is taking steps to combat misleading emails floating around from seemingly earnest supporter that spread untruths about voting; and a good deal more.

If you were born before, oh, 1975, you might not be familiar with Channel One. Born after, and you probably know it's an in-class news and advertising network beamed out to millions of American school kids. For the fourth time, the network is holding a mock online election that asks students for their presidential picks, a project called One Vote; The Internet might just be used for dirty election tricks this cycle, from denial-of-service attacks on candidates' websites to spoof emails purported to be from election officials, according to a hefty new report;The McCain campaign has launched an "I'm Joe the Plumber" video contest, the winner of which will, the campaign says, be used in a TV ad; and a good helping of more.

The Twitter Vote Report project, a evolving partnership with a number of remarkable organizations in collaboration with a amazingly talented network of volunteer developers, hit another milestone this week with a press release from the Election Protection Coalition announcing the effort:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: October 24, 2008

Use Twitter to Protect the Vote
Election Protection, techPresident, Rock the Vote, and Others Announce New Voter Protection Resource

Read on for the full text of the release.

We noted a while back the curious case of an anti-Sarah Palin email sent by two New York women to 40-odd friends that attracted a reported 150,000 responses. That humble missive has evolved into a multimedia campaign.; In these final days, the presidential campaigns are scrambling to reach out to undecideds or soft supporters and convert them into votes; Now that Obama has won -- the WebMarketing Association's Web Award for the better of the two candidates' websites, of course -- thoughts are turning to how a President Obama would use his much-vaunted Internet savvy to actually govern; and a good deal more.

"At this point," writes Colin Delany on techPresident, "the Internet is pretty much done." Our work here is finished! Actually, Colin's talking about the idea that new media campaign staffers' heavy lifting is behind them. But let's play dumb and indeed jump ahead a week to start thinking transition; Will the Huffington Post and its ilk be old news by next Wednesday? That's the question being asked by Advertising Age's Nat Ives. There's evidence indicating that the answer leans "yep;" Forget robocalls, says Salon's Farhad Manjoo. Their efficacy is more rooted in myth than fact. Text messaging is where it's at, argues Farhad, and it's also where Obama and his robust mobile campaign has a huge lead over McCain and his non-existent one.

Out of the minds of Google's Creative Lab's, where Googlers go to whip up the future, comes VoteHour.org. CEOs from eBay's John Donahoe to KPMG's Tim Flynn to the Donald himself urge their minions to take an hour from their work day to go vote; What's missing from GOP.com?, asks Mother Jones' Jonathan Stein. The answer is: a guy by the name of John McCain; Gartner Research group is out with a fascinating look at the state of government "social computing," which includes everything from social networks to collaborative web tools; and quite a bit more.

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.

If our referral logs and those of our friends are any indication, where to go to cast a ballot is at the top of many peoples' minds these days. A neat new mobile tool from CREDO Mobile, the New Organizing Institute, and Mobile Commons makes it trivial for voters to find their polling place, wherever they might happen to be; MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe is offering some considered musings on whether Barack Obama's social-networking efforts will actually turn millennials out to vote. It's an open question, and will be for a few more days; A life-long Southern California Republican is backing Barack Obama, and he's rounded up some professional filmmakers to make the case for his candidate; and a good deal more.