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As we saw last week with the blackouts associated with the Stop Online Piracy Act protests, the Internet has given common citizens of the United States an unprecedented ability to interact with the political process. This precedent is also evident in the social media battles being waged between candidates vying for the Republican presidential nomination. Tonight President Barack Obama will take that participation to a deeper level with the most connected State Of The Union Address ever.

MSNBC, Fox News, ABC, CBS and NBC have dedicated no time to covering the Stop Online Piracy Act in their evening newscasts since Oct. 1, according to a report by Ben Dimiero of Media Matters For America.

CNN, meanwhile, has dedicated a single evening news segment to the issue. All of the companies covered in the report have either publicly supported SOPA or have parent companies that have done so.

Scott Berken's book, Mindfire, is free until November 3, 2011. All of this and more in today's Daily Wrap.

Sometimes it's difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we thought it might be helpful to wrap up some of the most talked about stories. Assuming this goes over well, we're going to give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus as well. This is a new feature at ReadWriteWeb so we covet your feedback. If you have suggestions, please leave them in the comments below or reach out to me directly at robyn at readwriteweb.com.

The United States is having an election next week and the political machine is just getting warmed up for what is certain to be a very contentious presidential election year in 2012. Over the last 17 years or so, the Internet has become a major player in how voters gain information and make decisions. Since 2008, social media has proven to be a powerful force for campaigns to get out its message. That was especially prevalent in the 2010 mid-term elections and a roiling point will be reached in 2012. The state and local 2011 elections show how social media and the Internet have reached an inflection point where not only are they driving people towards voting booths, they are influencing how they vote.

Multiple surveys have been released recently from companies like Topix and Digitas that show that social media and the Internet has reached a critical point in informing voters and influencing their decisions. Check out the results below.

From gerrymandering of electoral districts to new debates over requiring voters to present government ID at polling stations, whether and how more or less people participate in elections has always been an intensely political matter. Beginning today, technology giant Google will place a new focus on analyzing and providing tools for maximizing voter engagement with elections, the company announced this morning.

In a blog post tagged Goodbye, Jake Parrillo of Google's Politics & Elections Team shut down the 2.5 year old Public Sector and Elections Lab blog and announced the launch of the company's new Google Politics and Elections Team Blog. The new blog will expand coverage of Google's growing activities aimed at increasing voter engagement.

• Robot! Feed me cake! Voice command-based robot feeding arm unveiled (Video): http://bit.ly/fYN5Bx via @DaveTheFuturist
• If Ernest Hemingway wrote Yelp reviews: http://bit.ly/ijcRVI via @TimHilcove
• Where have all the dude blogs gone? http://bit.ly/fCEl0r via @ThoughtCatalog
• Not a TV station, not a repurposed website: Sky News is an iPad news app that finally gets it right: http://bit.ly/huU9gc via @currybet
• Pucker up and blow: a window-mounted, wind-powered generator for your phone: http://bit.ly/g2C1gR via @walyou

One of the ongoing concerns about the move away from paper ballots to other sorts of electronic voting mechanisms is the vulnerability of these systems to tampering. Doubly so, perhaps, when the voting moves online. But Internet voting could conceivably provide a way for overseas and military voters to easily return their ballots, and so it's something that many municipalities are rightly interested in.

The District of Columbia has been conducting a pilot program that would provide online voting for absentee voters, and the city held a test in which they invited the public to help evaluate the system's security.

Above: Boutique book publisher and geek James Bridle has printed the 12,000 edits made to the controversial Wikipedia entry for Iraq War between December 2004 to November 2009 as a 7,000 page, 12 volume set of books.

"This is historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification.

"And for the first time in history, we're building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information. Everything should have a history button. We need to talk about historiography, to surface this process, to challenge absolutist narratives of the past, and thus, those of the present and our future." -James Bridle

YouTube is pushing "clickable but not skippable" in-stream ads in the leadup to the midterm elections. Apparently they're all the rage in the 15 battleground states where congressional seats are up for election this fall.

Ads with political content are subject to restrictions on the YouTube.com homepage. Update: YouTube contacted us and said that to the contrary: "Provided the ads do not involve accusations or attacks relating to an individual's personal life or character, they can run on the YouTube homepage." Interested parties should read the Terms of Service for themselves.

There's something rotten going on at massive social news site Digg. A sprawling campaign of political conservatives working together on secret mailing lists to orchestrate systematic burying of news stories and other users believed to be politically liberal has been uncovered by an investigation published on today on Alternet.

Report author Ole Ole Olson focused on a group called Digg Patriots, which he alleges used a now-deleted Yahoo Groups email list to distribute bury orders for more than 40,000 stories over the past 15 months. In addition to explicitly liberal political articles, "articles about education, homophobia, racism, science, the environment, economics, wealth disparity, world events, the media, green energy, and anything even slightly critical of the GOP/Tea Party/FoxNews/corporations are targets," Olson writes.