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.

As you know, we've been tracking e-voting and the CA story for a while. Today's lunchtime listen is from NPR's Talk of the Nation, August 3, 2007. In this 17 minute segment, NPR interviews Matt Bishop, co-director, Computer Security Laboratory; professor, department of computer science at UC Davis, the leader of the hacking effort of e-voting machines certified for use in CA. His red team was able to compromise the security of all the systems tested! Particularly interesting was his description of "social engineering" which is sort of like phishing in which people are manipulated into performing actions or divulging confidential information. In other words, the *technology* can be easily hacked out of human or social weakness!

We've been tracking the continuing saga of electronic voting for a while. You'll remember that last week, we posted about a report from two teams of researchers at the University of CA about the vulnerability of electronic voting machines. The latest news is that, on Friday, August 3, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen de-certified (with a path for conditional recertification) all the electronic voting machines used in California. Brad's blog has the scoop:

Bowen announced that she will be disallowing the use of Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen) voting systems made by the Diebold and Sequoia companies on Election Day, allowing only one DRE machine per polling place which may be used for disabled voters. The paper trails from votes cast on DREs manufactured by those two companies must be 100% manually counted after Election Day. DREs made by Hart-Intercivic are used in only one California county and will be allowed for use pending security upgrades.

This documentary exposes the vulnerability of electronic voting machines. The film follows investigative journalist Bev Harris as she investigates the security and accuracy of electronic voting systems. It's 1hr 22 minutes so perhaps this will be 2 lunchtime listens.

Now are you worried? On Saturday, San Francisco Chronicle staff writer John Wildermuth, in an article entitled, "Most Vote Machines lost test to hackers", described how teams of computer security experts (aka "hackers") hired by the state were able to crack every model of voting machine that they tested -- including Sequoia, Hart InterCivic and Diebold. The UC's report/document dump is now on the CA Secretary of State's site.

This obviously has national implications. Last week, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Rep. Rush Holt of New Jersey advanced H.R. 811, the "Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007," which amends the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require a voter-verified permanent paper ballot.

State-sanctioned teams of computer hackers were able to break through the security of virtually every model of California’s voting machines and change results or take control of some of the systems’ electronic functions, according to a University of California study released Friday. The researchers “were able to bypass physical and software security in every machine they tested,” said Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who authorized the “top to bottom review” of every voting system certified by the state.

BlackBoxVoting.org posted an open letter to CA Secretary of State Debra Bowen in which BBV board member Jim March said, "Please consider taking more aggressive action. Decertify everything, citing the obvious failure of Federal oversight as the primary cause." Feel free to contact California Secretary of State, Debra Bowen and let her know what you think of electronic voting machines.

There's a new site of interest to any political junky. It's called Wanna be presidents. WBP is a dynamic blogroll of all of the blogs of the 2008 presidential hopefuls -- or at least those that are officially running. Read the latest from all the candidates in one place. Nicely done!

The site was put together by David Silver, professor of media studies at University of San Francisco, and his colleagues at Sociedad de las Indias Electrónicas, a group of Spanish technology activists in Madrid, using a tool called Feevy. With Feevy, you can repurpose the RSS from all of your favorite blogs and display the collected dynamic content on your site. Try it out, but don't forget to read FGI's aggregator "In other news..."!

Testimony Released on Electronic Voting Machines

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has once again released a thorough report: this time on a study of the Net's role in the 2006 elections. Here's the summary:

Twice as many Americans used the internet as their primary source of news about the 2006 campaign compared with the most recent mid-term election in 2002.

Some 15% of all American adults say the internet was the place where they got most of their campaign news during the election, up from 7% in the mid-term election of 2002.

A post-election survey shows that the 2006 race also produced a notable class of online political activists. Some 23% of those who used the internet for political purposes actually created or forwarded online original political commentary or politically-related videos.

The full report adds a lot of context to this, of course. For example, 31% of Americans gathered info about the races online and talked about the elections via email. And for those under 36 who have broadband, 35% said the Internet was their main source of information about the races. And Republicans and Democrats were equally likely to rely on the Net for campaign news...

In looking through their list of reports, there were several others of interest including:

• Robo-calls in the 2006 campaign
• More Americans turn to the internet for news about politics
• The Internet and Campaign 2004
• The Internet as a Resource for News and Information about Science
• The Future of the Internet II

And many more. Happy reading!