It was a moving victory speech from PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA! On this night, in this town, there are parties in the street, cars honking, a feeling like 11:59 on New Year's eve. Below is the tag cloud of President Obama's speech, courtesy of tag crowd. For those that weren't able to tune in, here's audio of his speech. Now the real work begins!

Here's a handy little google tool to help you find out where to vote. Go to the 2008 US Voter Info google map, put in your address and voila! you have your voting station and can easily get driving/walking directions. the sidebar also includes information on voter registration, contact information for local voting officials and a link to the Google 2008 election site to track what's happening on election day. This map tool was developed by state and local election officials from Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, and Los Angeles County and the Voting Information Project in conjunction with the League of Women Voters.

[shout out to the UC Berkeley Library govblog from whom I got the tip!]

Last week, at the Technology Review's Emerging Technologies Conference held at MIT, there was a panel on electronic voting systems in which CA Secretary of State Debra Bowen participated -- along with Moderator Jason Pontin, Editor in Chief, Technology Review; Doug Chapin, Director, electionline.org; Ronald L. Rivest, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT; and Pamela Smith, President, Verified Voting Foundation. You may remember that in 2007, Bowen ordered a complete top-to-bottom review of voting systems in CA. I'm really glad to see a top-level politician sitting on a panel of cutting edge technologists and really, really glad to hear that top-level politician advocate for Open-source software.

Now, I'm not saying the open source is the end all and be all solution to the myriad issues facing e-voting (see Bev harris' Black Box Voting for more on those issues); but it's great to see that Bowen at least gets that open source software is at least part of the solution. We've been saying that for quite some time. For a complete wrapup of the panel see Lucas Mearian's ComputerWorld blog

One method of addressing software issues associated with the vast majority of proprietary e-voting applications out there is to move to using open source, especially for applications residing on optical scanners, which have been particularly troublesom. The concern is that IT administrators can't look at the software to correct errors or tweak it for a particular county's needs. Open source would go a long ways to disclosing problems associated with today's propretary e-voting applications, Bowen said.

[Thanks /.]

You can tell we're coming down the home stretch of the 2008 presidential election as we're being bombarded with ads, and more information than we can read even if we'd aced the Evelyn Wood Speed reading course! Luckily, there are more and more sites popping up to help us sift through those info-mountains. A couple of weeks ago, we posted about some mapping tools based on publicly available polling data.

now, VoterWatch has released the 2008 Presidential Debates Project. On September 26, the night of the first Presidential debate, Dick Morris, Cynthia McKinney and many others will provide commentary and perspective surrounding the debates. Best of all, they'll use the VoterWatch media player, to comment and blog within footage of the U.S. presidential debates. So, feel free to get your analysis from the paid presidential supporters in spin alley (which John Stewart aptly renamed "deception lane!"), OR check out the analysis from across the political spectrum from the likes of Brett Winterble of Covert Radio, Green Party Presidential Candidate, Cynthia McKinney, Political Author and Commentator, Dick Morris, Political Strategist, Sophia Nelson, Public Agenda, Reason Magazine, The Bob Barr for President Team, The Heritage Foundation, and VoteGopher.

Here's a handy dandy guide for all of you out there, and especially those on college campuses. The Harvard Institute of Politics has put together the Absentee Voter Guide. This guide contains all the information college students need to vote by absentee ballot from school. You can get absentee ballot or mail-in voting applications from all U.S. states as well as absentee and mail-in voting requirements. Please pass it around!

Last week I posted a tag cloud of Barack Obama's speech accepting the Presidential candidacy of the Democratic party. Today is John McCain's turn. I got the transcript at zimbio, the same site I used to get the Obama speech. Tag Crowd was again used to analyze the transcript. Enjoy!

If you're like me, you want to keep track of the presidential race between Barack Obama and John McCain. I thought I'd share a few sites that I've bookmarked in order to keep up to the minute. My favorite site is Electoral-vote.com. E-V collects national and state polls and shows a nice map of the current electoral vote count. As new state polls are released, the maps, spreadsheets, tables, graphs, etc. are updated. There's also a comparison for that day in the 2004 presidential race, roll-over stats for how each state voted since 1992, and tracking of Senate and House elections.

Another site of interest is FiveThirtyEight "electoral projections done right." This one has lots of graphs, "tipping point" states, a return on investment index and more. 538 (the # of electors in the electoral college of course :-) ) also tracks governors' races. It's run by Nate Silver, a writer and baseball statistician. You know how crazy baseball fans are for data, so you know that this site is sucking up as much data as they can, chewing it up and serving it up in lots of different ways.

Also check out RealClearPolitics. This one pulls together news, blogs, editorials, polls and electoral maps (although the mapping feature is only for presidential race).

[Thanks David Weinberger/JoHo for the RealClearPolitics tip!]

We've played around before with tag cloud word analysis (using a tool called Tag Crowd), so I thought I'd do a cloud for Barack Obama's convention speech on thursday night. I'll post another cloud for John McCain's speech on Thursday.

The sheer volume of election coverage can be daunting to follow for even the most hard-core election junkie, let alone the casual observer. A few sites do everyone the favor of breaking campaign reports and statements down to the facts, attempting to separate the truth from the truthiness.

FactCheck.org is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. It is essentially a multimedia blog that responds to the factual assertions and allusions made in politics at the federal, state, and local levels. FactCheck.org's staff elegantly analyzes candidates' statements on such issues as a potential gas price fix for factual consistency. They dutifully list their reference sources and, for contextual emphasis, they frequently provide audio and video links to the candidates' actual comments.

PolitiFact, mentioned previously on FreeGovInfo, is a service of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly Inc. PolitiFact's trademark is its Truth-O-Meter, which measures political statements on a scale of "True" to "Pants on fire." It's handy for those who want bottom-line analysis straight away. Like FactCheck.org, PolitiFact does have full articles with which it provides sources and multimedia links, although the analysis is not quite as deep. But PolitiFact does a better job of organizing and integrating its content: you can browse statements by Truth-O-Meter rating, by subject, by the person who said it, by whom it was said against, and even by where it was said (TV ad, blog post, speech, etc.).

Other interesting fact-checking sites include:

The Center for Public Integrity - A "nonprofit, nonpartisan, non-advocacy, independent journalism organization" that uses investigative journalism to examine political and campaign issues in depth. Of particular note is the Buying of the President site which looks at how money influences the presidential campaigns.

Opensecrets.org - Tracks money in politics and distills it into graphs, charts, and brief summaries. It is run by the non-partisan, non-profit Center for Responsive Politics.

The Fact Checker - A Washington Post blog that analyzes campaign statements in a similar way to FactCheck.org and PolitiFact. The difference here is that topics are prompted by user suggestions. It employs a "Pinocchio Test" similar to PolitiFact's Truth-O-Meter.

-Brian

Recent statistics released by the University of Michigan's American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) show that consumer satisfaction with federal government websites and e-government in general have fallen in the first quarter of 2008 as compared with the final quarter of 2007. The score represents the third quarter of decline in consumer satisfaction in a row and is the lowest level of consumer satisfaction with e-government websites in three years.

There are a couple of possible factors in the decline. Consumers seem to be dissatisfied that government websites are not evolving into more than information dumps. Consumers want to see government websites that allow them to do business online, to take care of required paperwork, and to control their experiences of the website -- which is something that many commercial websites allow, at least on a limited scale. So far, that is not happening with government websites as much as consumers expect.

Another factor: presidential candidates on the campaign trail are mentioning transparency in electronic government and improving citizens' experience of e-government either minimally or not at all. Consumers aren't getting the sense that e-government is a priority, or even a secondary interest, among any of the presidential candidates.

The Sunshine Week website created a page entitled: "What the Candidates Are Saying About Open Government and FOI" based on the the Sunshine Week survey responses and analysis of articles, speeches, and debate transcripts that give insight into the candidates' thoughts on government access to information.

They state: "Only New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards responded, and only Richardson answered all the questions. The remaining four leading major party candidates were re-surveyed following Super Tuesday in February. To date, none has replied".

They mention Obama's Senate co-sponsorship of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, which went into effect on New Years Day '08 with the launch of USAspending.gov, a site that "gives people access to information on government contracts, grants and other awards".

Speaking of which, USAspending.gov is based on the software that runs Fedspending.org. I'm going to examine both these sites and see how the differ, but so far, the only difference I'm seeing is that USAspending.gov has a lengthy privacy policy which dotgovwatch.com claims is different from their previous warning!

The February 2008 issue of Searcher magazine has an article by Laura Gordon-Murnane entitled "The 51st State:  Congressional Elections" (pdf) in which she talks about the other (non-Presidential) federal elections.  In November the nation will also elect 435 Representatives and 33 Senators, and we don't hear much about all those elections.  So to help educate us before we vote she has thoughtfully provided an online tutorial called Tech Tools for the American Voter and the 2008 Congressional Elections.  It steps you through  how to get educated for the upcoming Congressional elections. You can use it to find out if you are registered to vote, find biographical information on your Congressman or Senator as well as  his or her voting records, and follow the money donations and campaign fundraising for the upcoming election.   The tutorial shows different websites and how you can learn more about the voting process and the candidates. It's informative and it provides a painless way to get informed before casting your vote.

Hat tip to Sabrina Pacifici's blog, beSpacific.

The ONE Campaign has put together a nice little tool to compare the statements of all the presidential candidates:

Tens of thousands of ONE members asked the candidates to go "On The Record" with their plans to combat extreme poverty and global disease. “On the Record” is a project of ONE Action and provides information to help evaluate the candidates on ONE’s issues.

Learn more about the campaign.

Here's a pretty cool project called 10Questions. It's sorta like Reddit for the presidential election. Here's how it works:

1. You ask a video question to the presidential candidates
2. You vote on the best questions
3. The top ten questions get selected
4. Candidates post their video answers
5. You decide if they actually answered the questions

Go check out the site and send in your video questions. You've got 28 days before the top ten questions are presented to the candidates.

Unlike television debates, the 10Questions Presidential Forum makes full use of the web’s potential to expand participation in politics. Everyone has an opportunity to ask a question, and to rally support for their question being in the top ten. The candidates have plenty of time to formulate their answers, and can post in-depth replies. Finally, the community will be able to grade the candidates’ answers. With large numbers of people participating, the candidates will have an incentive to pay attention. Who knows, maybe we’ll even change the course of the election!

Congresspedia.org has just launched a new site called "Wiki the Vote," a project to build citizen-written profiles on each and every candidate for Congress in 2008. What a cool new tool. Not only will it be collaborative in terms of reader-editors, but collaborative in terms of data -- collating campaign contributions from Open Secrets campaign database together with reader-submitted information on every Congressional candidate for the 2008 cycle.

The project is starting with nearly 300 basic profiles to be expanded and updated by citizens, journalists and even the campaigns themselves (or those of their opponents). Unlike Wikipedia, people connected to the subjects of articles are free to add to them as long as their contributions are rhetoric-free and comprised of fully documented, verifiable facts. The citizen editors are assisted and fact-checked by professional editors.

The first set of articles is based on confirmed candidates according to 2008racetracker.com and will eventually expand to cover every candidate on the ballot in the primary and general elections next year. When the OpenSecrets.org 2008 congressional campaign contributions database goes online in a few weeks, the candidate profiles will also display live feeds tracking the money race and who is funding it.