Link: http://www.evoting-experts.com/index.php
Ed Felten has launched an evoting experts blog at evoting-experts.com. I'll be joinging Adam Stubblefield, Avi Rubin, Dan Wallach, David Dill and Ed there to address problems as they come up in the 2004 election. This will be a great site for as-it-happens information (reporters, take note... check the blog first!).
Link: http://www.oaklandtribune.com/Stories/0,1413,82~1726~2504158,00.html
Americans learned in 2000 that watching recounts and courts decide a piano-wire tight election -- like the making of laws -- is not for the faint-hearted.
Yet four years later, they're as fixated as spectators at a train wreck. Thousands in fact are rushing into the mayhem, not just for better seats but to move to the front of the train, seize the controls, or at least tend the wounded.
It begins with 10,000 Democratic election lawyers, plus seven litigation SWAT teams staged by fueled jets to deploy at a word from John Kerry, and an equal mobilization of Republican lawyers, an army rarely described to avoid the political image as the litigious party.
In military terms, the nation is shaping up as a battleground between the equivalent of two army divisions of lawyers, trading charges of Democratic registration fraud and Republican voter suppression.
[...]
Beyond them are three more divisions -- 6,000 lawyers and 25,000 tech wizards and civil-rights activists -- jetting on their own dime from California, New York and other states relegated by polls to the election sidelines. They're mostly working for the Election Protection Coalition, an assemblage of mostly left-leaning organizations now sworn to nonpartisanship.
This is a great outline of the Election Protection Coalition and the environment in which it exists.
In addition to other really scary costumes for Halloween, our local halloween shop in Berkeley has some really weird ones... like fat stripper suits, large genitalia, beer bottles and even a milk carton hat:

Link: http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/28/182210&tid=17&tid=219
Thanks to Rob for letting us flex our server muscle in prep. for E-Day (note, I didn't write "Joe from EFF"... I would have preferred "Joe, EFF groupie"...):
Joe from the EFF writes "Verified Voting has just gone live with a number of tools for all you data-hungry election nerds out there. Amongst the goods: an election guide for geeks, a voter's guide to electronic voting, the Verifier database of county-by-county election information and the Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS) which will be used on E-day by attorneys and observers in the field to collect data about election incidents called into the Election Protection Coalition's hotline, 1-866-OUR-VOTE. The geek community is playing a particularly active role in this year's eleciton via VV's TechWatch program. However, we could still use the help of the slashdot community, and all you have to do is click: We need to test the resiliency of the Verifier database and the EIRS before the election.
Link: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/002054.php
(Donna (at EFF's DeepLinks) always knows what's up...)
Mypollingplace.com is here to help.
With most states reporting massive new voter registrations and many political observers worrying about potential voter confusion and allegations of fraud on Nov.2, one organization has created a web-based tool to answer questions and provide information.
The site, www.mypollingplace.com, is sponsored by the People for the American Way Foundation, [... b]y typing in their home address and zip code into the searchable data base, voters are given the location of their polling place, a map to reach it, and information on the type of voting equipment used at the polling place and how to operate it.