Voting, in some form or another, is on the minds and screens of Americans everywhere during this election year. As everyone knows it’s American Idol season and millions of Americans are voting by phone and text messaging for their favorites. However, in spite of the great interest in and high turnout for the presidential primaries on the Democratic side, the voting system -- the mechanics that should allow for an easy and secure one-person-one-vote process, a system that the government has invested $4 billion since the debacle in 2000 -- continues to be broken.

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It's taken me a little longer than I had hoped to pull together the data on how the Republican presidential candidates are doing in terms of bottom-up support for their campaigns online, for which I apologize. Here's the headline: They're almost invisible on the web. Compared to the Democratic presidential field, which I posted on a few days ago, the Republican contenders* are playing bush league ball online. Not even Triple A.

To give you just one example, if you add up all the friends all the Republican candidates have on their MySpace pages, and compare it to all the friends the Ds have, the totals will amaze you: 4,007 to 51,471. If I take fringe candidates Ron Paul and Tom Tancredo out of that equation, the Republican total drops below 2,000.

In the national elections held last week in Holland, the right-of-center Christian Democratic Appeal party won the most seats in the parliament, but while these results were seen as proof of a "public schizophrenia" regarding the treatment and acceptance of immigrants, there was another underlying element to the election that reflected the evolving role of technology in national polls.

A non-partisan Dutch group called the Instituut voor Publik en Politiek, or the Dutch Centre for Political Participation, created a web-based voter guide called the StemWijzer that polls voters' political preferences. Voters take a ten-minute test called VoteMatch that asks yes/no questions ranging from "Citizens should elect a prime minister" to "A homeowner receives tax relief on mortgage interest. This scheme should be made less advantageous for people in the higher income groups who take out a new mortgage" to "No new mosques may be built." After users have answered all of the questions, StemWijzer recommends which parties to vote for based on the user's answers.

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Two Facebook researchers we recently profiled are back at it, crunching the numbers to come up with post-election data that raises questions about what role social networking might have played in the election.

While not yet complete and in need of more analysis, the early results from Christine Williams and Jeff Gulati's post-election study suggest how hard it is to pin down the ideology and tastes of Facebook users.

Using CNN election results together with their exit poll data for 23 governors' races and Facebook's tally of supporters for these same gubernatorial candidates, they discovered that discrepancies in voting trends exist among the public at large, 18-29 year-olds, and Facebook's candidate supporters.

actual vote average % Democrat = 49.5%

actual vote average % Republican = 45%

18-29 year olds average % Democrat = 55.0%

18-29 year olds average % Republican = 38.4%

Facebook supporters % for Democrat = 52.2%

Facebook supporters % for Republican = 39.9%

Conclusion: Facebook supporters are in between the actual vote and the

18-29 year old vote.

While Facebook supporters' tastes are different from other groups', Williams thinks Facebook users are in some ways like anyone else: they don't only respond to an ideology or a set of political platitudes, but also to those ineffable qualities that make us like or dislike candidates. As she told me, "Facebook supporters are responding to personal attributes- i.e., reacting to the profile content and to the emails from their Facebook friends, not simply the ideological bent of their age group or the actual political climate."

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The election fallout pieces are popping up now and some of them bring encouraging news about the effect of the blogosphere and technology on the midterms. Here's a running list of important pieces and sites that suggest the future of social technology and politics:

• Rick Perlstein posted a piece at TNR online, "Who Deserves Credit for the Democratic Combeback?" For Perlstein the answer isn't Rahm Emanuel but Blue America and the netroots. "The bloggers, blunt as they may be, think they have a better plan for building a lasting Democratic majority. Last night's results suggest the rest of us should start taking it seriously." Kos and myDD have more on the the netroots' now-proven ability to shake up an election.
• Check out the Polling Place Photo Project and their gallery of election day photos.
• Some technologies hindered rather than helped the democratic process. Chelsea Clinton couldn't vote at her polling place until she filled out an affidavit and cast a paper ballot. Some voters were treated to annoying "robo calls" that appeared to be designed to deceive voters and keep them away from the polls.
• Colin Delany at e.politics posted a wrap-up of the election, highlighting "some lessons I’ve taken away from the last few months of online political frenzy."
• Check out the videos posted at Video the Vote, which document long waits, broken voting machines, and other irregularities.
• David Cohn at NewAssignment.net provides a roundup up how citizen journalists covered the election, including an interesting look at how, following the lead of bloggers and citizen journalists, newspapers are developing ways to track election problems.

Check out our TechPolitics 2006 Symposium for a glimpse of what prominent technologists, politicos, bloggers, and journalists think about the role of technology in this and future elections.

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