Upon first seeing the resignation coverage, even I wondered why Tina Fey was continuing to beleaguer Palin with her spot-on impersonation. After a few minutes I realized only Andy Samberg would have the gall to produce a Saturday Night Live skit of this length and settled in to watch Palin defer her duties to Republican Lieut. Governor Shawn Parnell.

In 2008, Palin Halloween costume posts were extremely popular, a NYC bar saw record customers for their widely promoted Palin drag show and BoingBoing even featured a Hustler film touting a Palin lookalike.

While last year's election would not have been dull, it appears that Sarah Palin and her many iterations were the internet's comic relief in an environment that might have otherwise been staunch. In fact, Palin took the brunt of ridicule on the Republican side while John McCain only came under scrutiny for his advanced age.

So the question remains, did Americans turn out to polls in record numbers because of their wholehearted belief in Barack Obama, or was a portion of that due to a mainstream distaste for Sarah Palin?

Said Palin in her resignation speech, "You are naive right now if you don't see a full court press from the national level picking away right now - a good point guard. Here's what she does, she drives through a full court press, protecting the ball... she knows exactly when to pass the ball so that the team can win. And that's exactly what I'm doing..."

Michael Jordan was a great point guard and he didn't quit the first time to help the Chicago Bulls, he quit to pursue a Minor League baseball career. When Palin says she's going to "make a positive difference from outside the Governor's office," do you think she's going to launch a presidential campaign, land a talk show deal or do something else?

Over the past few weeks, we've heard of several different ways we can use the web to keep track of the U.S. Election coverage. We can use Google to locate our voting locations, record our voting experience for YouTube, and even Twitter our voting issues. Now that E-Day is finally upon us, it's time revisit those tools as we prepare for the most digitally enhanced election ever.

• Visit Google's 2008 Election site to get voter information, directions to the polls, or your state's voter hotline. (And once you know your polling site, you can catch a ride with the Carpool to the Polls Facebook app).
• Vote411 has a poll finder and other related election information, ideal for last minute information.
• Can I Vote? If you're not sure if you're registered to vote, head over to Can I Vote to confirm your details.
• Overseas Vote Foundation: Information on voting if you're living or traveling outside of the United States.
• Pew Center on the States: Information on poll opening and closing times.
• Election Protection: Monitors voting problems. Place to report issues or track them as they happen.
• Track voter rights news and resources at the nonpartisan Election Protection coalition's 866ourvote.org.
• Check out a map-based overview of voting machines used in each state from VerifiedVoting.org and the Verified Voter Foundation, both run by technologists advocating for reliable and publicly verifiable elections.

Record Your Experience

With Video

• Bring a video camera with you to the polls to capture your voting experience on YouTube's Video Your Vote channel. Google is using Google Maps to track these videos across the country - and to see where polling problems might be occurring during the day.
• Document the irregularities or other problems you encounter with your cell phone camera, Flip videocam, or other device, and then upload that content to the CBS News social-media site CBS Eye Mobile. Alternatively, you can submit by e-mail to the address politics@cbseyemobile.com. The CBS News Investigates team will monitor those submissions, and may then present select ones in election coverage at CBSNews.com or in on-air reports.

Via Twitter

TwitterVoteReport is a Twitter app that will aggregate all the election day tweets that use the Twitter hashtag #votereport. Just include "#votereport" in your tweet in order for it to get tracked by the service. More advanced Twitterers can also include other hashtags like:

• #[zip code] to indicate the zip code where you're voting; ex., "#12345″
• L:[address or city] to drill down to your exact location; ex. "L:1600 Pennsylvania Avenue DC"
• #machine for machine problems; ex., "#machine broken, using prov. ballot"
• #reg for registration troubles; ex., "#reg I wasn't on the rolls"
• #wait:[minutes] for long lines; ex., "#wait:120 and I'm coming back later"
• #early if you're voting before November 4th
• #good or #bad to give a quick sense of your overall experience
• #EP[your state] if you have a serious problem and need help from the Election Protection coalition; ex., #EPOH

From Your Mobile

• Send a text message to 66937 and start your message with "#votereport"
• Download and use the iPhone app for VoteReport
• Find the "votereport" app in the Google Android marketplace

From Your Phone

• Enter a report by calling 567-258-8683 (VOTE), 208-272-9024, or 617-960-8900
• If you have a problem voting or see one, call the CNN Voter Hotline at 877-GOCNN-08 (1-877-462-6608).

On The Web

• If you find yourself having trouble casting your vote, VoterStory.org can help. This non-partisan site is designed to let voters report problems with their local polling place.
• If you have a problem voting or see one, share your early voting experience with CNN's iReport.

Get The Election Results

Videos

• CNN, MSNBC and ABC News will stream their election coverage live.
• MSNBC's feed is already up. Watch it here.
• Watch up-to-the minute election news on Hulu with their MSNBC Decision 08 coverage.
• ABC News will stream using Windows Media Player, but will make its feed embeddable for local affiliates using tech from live-streaming service Ustream.
• Watch John McCain's official Ustream feed to see his final stump speech at 11:30 a.m. MT in Colorado.
• Watch Barack Obama's official Ustream feed at 9 p.m. CT in Chicago to see his concession/victory speech.
• Politico's James Kotecki will stream live on Tuesday evening 7 p.m. to midnight.

On The Web

• The New York Times will publish a dashboard to track results as they come in at the county level. NYTimes.com will also keep track of which races the major news organizations have already called. More on the Times' efforts here.
• Visit TwitterVoteReport.com to see the reports flow in.
• The CBS News Investigates team will monitor video submissions (see above section), and may then present select ones in election coverage at CBSNews.com or in on-air reports.
• Political videos will be featured on the Google homepage all day, including videos made especially for Election Day by both the McCain and Obama campaigns.
• Current is incorporating streams from social media sites, Digg, Twitter, 12seconds.tv, along with music from DJ Diplo.
• Access news and results as they occur on the Google Maps Elections Gallery (you can even embed the results onto your own site), or via the Elections section of Google News.
• Socialmedian is pulling in all sorts of media from tweets to blog posts to Flickr photos, widgetizing all the updates they find, and featuring them on web sites like the washingtonpost.com, guardian.co.uk, and mediadeluge.com.
• Ask.com launched Election Poll Smart Answers that give local polling information in just one click.
• Twitter tracks election-related tweets at election.twitter.com
• Upload photo messages about the election, the candidates and the issues to Giveusahope.com.
• Follow and contribute crowd-sourced election stories and add your two cents on media bias at Skewz.com.
• Take a look at the aggregation of election-related news stories, blogs, polls, video and commentary on Electicker2008.com.
• Contribute election-related news stories and video and blog posts to Politics.com.

Just The Polls

• CNN will post their exit polls here.
• Gallup.com - The election 2008 poll results from Gallup, one of the best known polling companies.
• Pollster.com - Tracks various polls and gives you updated charts on how each candidate is tracking. Also offers an electoral map as well as analysis of what each poll means.
• RealClearPolitics.com - Features poll breakdowns by state. You can also see a national overview that shows you which candidate is in the lead in each state and by how many points.
• USAElectionPolls.com - Brings together information on national and state polls, battleground polls, house & senate polls, and more.
• USAToday.com - While USA Today's map looks like an electoral vote tracker, it is a map of polls with color coding to give you an idea of the percentage of difference between the candidates.

From Your Mobile

• AT&T and Verizon's live mobile TV streaming provider, Flo TV, is offering all manner of coverage of the election, including content from NBC, CBS, FOX News, MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, and MTV News--such as "CBS Evening News with Katie Couric" and "NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams." Flo TV will also offer special Election Day versions of "The Colbert Report" and "The Daily Show," along with content from MTV's "Choose or Lose" and recap up through the first 100 days in office.
• Sprint will also have live streams and TV clips on election day, featuring content from ABC News Now, CNN Mobile and FOX News Channel.
• Election 08 application ($0.99)  delivers the latest McCain and Obama polling numbers for every state, graphs historical polling trends, and charts voting patterns in previous elections.
• On your mobile phone, head to m.google.com/elections to locate your voting location as well as access the latest news.
• Get SMS text alerts about the election from the New York Times by messaging 698698 with the text: Newsalerts (to stop, text: Stop newsalerts) or text Elections and your zip code (eg, Elections07407) (to spot, text: Stop Elections)
• Viigo has just added a real-time results for tomorrow's US Election. The Live Election Results Feed will provide both Overall and State By State results throughout the evening as each contender demonstrates a Firm Lead, or is declared a Winner in each State. Results will be updated every 5 minutes. Download it for free from here.

Reward Yourself!

Now that you voted, reward yourself with some free stuff! If you go to Starbucks today and tell them you voted, you get a free cup of coffee. If you go to Ben & Jerry's today and tell them you voted, you get a free scoop of ice cream. If you go to Krispy Kreme today and tell them you voted, you get a free donut.

Thanks to Silicon Alley Insider for video sites, Inquisitr for voter info sites, AppScout for mobile voter sites, GigaOM for voter info sites, Mashable for poll web sites

(Image credit: Zappowbang)

"We see this as far more than a one day gathering. We'll combine an online discussion with a real-time forum, and using Google's technologies and YouTube's video platform, voters will have the opportunity to learn about the candidates and to raise the issues they think are more important for America's future both before and after the New Orleans forum," said David Drummond, a Senior VP at Google in a video introduction (embedded below).

One thing we would love to see Google do with the second debate, is to allow users to self moderate and decide which questions make it to air. In the previous YouTube debates, a set of moderators at CNN and YouTube chose the final questions from among those submitted.

As TechPresident notes, the Commission on Presidential Debates has also announced a set of presidential debates, the second of which will be held in a "town hall" style format and will solicit questions via the Internet. The Internet has clearly removed a level of separation between candidates and the public and made it easier for people to ask questions directly of those running for president. Despite the occasional silliness that seeped through to the last YouTube debate, that is certainly a good thing.

Even though we all know that the social media being wrangled by today's political candidates is really in the hands of staffers, we still appreciate it when it's done properly - giving us the illusion the candidates are listening and they really do care.

In Barak Obama's camp, whose tech-savvy we've pointed out in the past, seems to get Twitter. Besides just tweeting his news, it's clear he's using some sort of auto-follow script to follow those who follow him.

Getting Followed Feels Good

You're Doing it Wrong!

As Charles McKeever says on OpenSourceMarketer:

"Even though an automated script would not seem very sincere, there is a powerful psychological trigger going on here. By following you Obama’s campaign is trying to send the message that they understand how things work, they want to communicate, and they want to hear from you."

By not following any users on Twitter, Hillary's page seems stark and empty - no faces and icons filling up the sidebar. McKeever notes that her lack of participation also highlights the words at the bottom of the Twitter sidebar more clearly on her page: "block hillaryclinton." These words, thanks to the lack of icons, appear above the fold.

Image via OpenSourceMarketer

Meanwhile,  Obama's camp has gotten into the spirit of Twitter. Maybe it's no more genuine than any other politician, but at least it's a good show. His page is brighter, branded with his logo, and filled with the faces of those he follows.

Comparing the Twitter pages of the candidates

John McCain, on the other hand, appears to be ignoring Twitter completely. A search of his site reveals no results for any mention of Twitter and a search on Twitter reveals no official John McCain user.

Where's the real McCain?

The Exploitation of Social Media

Unfortunately, after the campaigning ends, it often becomes apparent that the illusion that candidates were listening, really was an illusion after all. Take John Edwards's use of Twitter, for example. When his campaign ended, so did his tweets. No so long, no goodbye, no account deletion. Yet he still has 4,573 followers.

The abandoned page

For the citizens of the web, the feeling is that of having been exploited. On his blog, Stowe Boyd writes:

So, you opt to try to exploit the edglings by signing up to Twitter, and writing a blog, and all that newfangled web stuff, trying to mine the potential there with ersatz involvement and cheesy, inauthentic participation: cramming old one:many messaging into a conversationally rich environment. Then, you drop out. And proof [sic] that it is totally bogus, you just stop...Proof of old politics wolf in new politics sheep's clothing: they assume the ways of the new social web revolution as a means to come into contact with us, but when they lose (and maybe when they win, as well?) they drop the pretense of involvement, and go back to whatever they really believe in. Which is clearly not this new emerging whatever-the-hell-it-is on the web.

That's a bit dramatic, notes Craig Stoltz on Web 2.Oh...Really?, especially considering Edwards' wife illness, but nevertheless, it raises a good question - will the tweeting end when the campaign does? Win or lose?

Should Social Media Be Important to the Candidates?

Of course it should. The online crowd may be a niche audience when it comes to the nation as a whole, but it's a crowd that is easy to find, access, and connect with. We even provide the tools to do so. We're practically begging to be won over. Just show a little savvy in the ways of tech, and we're yours.

However, we would like to see candidates who didn't rely on faceless interns to update their various accounts so much. Why not have a social media community leader/evangelist in charge of the political brand instead? We know that it's not really Hillary at the keyboard anyway, so maybe it's time to drop the illusion.

But why would an evangelist be a good thing? As Mario Sundar notes on Marketing Nirvana,

"The same reasons it helps a company have a community evangelist. Two main reasons. 1. It humanizes the political brand - it helps having a turn-to person when you’d like to offer feedback 2. Crisis Management. Like in Edwards case, given all the brouhaha over his absence these days, it’d be nice to have someone from their campaign (it could be an intern) who actually responds authentically to social media mentions."

An evangelist would also be real. Unlike an intern pretending to be the candidate, the brand would be represented by an actual person. One who knew not to upload inflammatory videos to YouTube. One who knew what Twitter tools to use to send thank you notes to followers. One who knew the power of the blogs. And, maybe one who would continue to tweet, perhaps even for free, after the votes are counted and the campaign comes to an end.

Jim Edlin has a long and distinguished history in the IT industry, including being the co-founder and first editor of PC Magazine. While giving my family and I a lift back to our hotel after the Crunchies (the taxis were non-existent that night!), Jim explained to me more about OnlinePrimary.

Jim Edlin describes OnlinePrimary on his website as "a personal project launched out of dissatisfaction with both the U. S. presidential primary election process and the current direction of using technology in elections." In a follow-up email conversation, he explained that "over the last year I have become increasingly distressed by a couple of things about how we do elections here in the US." The first is "the circus that [the] presidential primary system has become", such as states madly scrambling to get their primary earlier in the sequence so it will be more likely to affect the outcome. Also part of the circus is "horse-race-style media coverage that all-too-often becomes self-fulfilling prophecy." The second thing that prompted Edlin to start OnlinePrimary was "the disgraceful showing that technology (my field of endeavor) is making as it moves into the mainstream of the election process." He thinks that technology has failed in elections thus far:

"I don't understand why the straightforward process of casting and tallying votes should require special-purpose machines costing tens of thousands of dollars each, from companies so suspect of fraud and incompetence that they have to change their names (as Diebold Election Systems recently did) to hide from the shame."

Thinking big, Edlin decided to build a website "that would illustrate some alternate visions about both how US presidential primaries might work and about how technology might better support the election process more generally." He also wants the site to become a home for discussions and catalyst to action for new technology-based approaches to elections. As well as the onlineprimary.us domain, Edlin bought onlineconvention.us and onlineelection.us - indicating the broad plans he has.

What is OnlinePrimary?

At its core OnlinePrimary is a single, national, popular-vote primary - conducted using basic Web technology. Or at least it's an experiment in what such a system would look like, were it to become reality in the future. Edlin admits that there are "lots of questions to be worked out about these approaches", including security, auditability, ready accessability to all voters. Also he says it would take a lot of "political and legal gymnastics" to bring about changes like this to the US primaries system. But he says that OnlinePrimary is "a first crack" at building such a system.

In my tests, OnlinePrimary turned out to be a basic website form and still a little buggy (an SQL error popped up after I entered my selections). Here is what it looked like when I 'voted' for my Democratic choices:

There isn't a lot more to it at this time, although there are hints at the features to come. For example there is a "credibility rating", described as "based on a formula that takes into account how many ballots have been submitted from a particular internet address over various periods of time." Again, it's fairly basic. But I'm sure the technology will be enhanced as this project goes on.

The results section shows the promise of how real-time statistics could be used in an Internet primaries system:

Conclusion

Although the current site is relatively bare and there aren't many features, there's reason to think that OnlinePrimary could quickly ramp up. For one, Jim Edlin has been involved with technology mixed with politics before. In 1994 the company he co-founded, The HyperMedia Group (HMG), developed an interactive campaign video kiosk used by a candidate for California governor. And in 1996 HMG developed the California campaign website for Bill Clinton's re-election campaign. Edlin notes that "my personal involvement was small", but he is proud that his company HMG worked on those technology-enabled political projects.

Also Edlin notes that this is just the beginning of the experiment and that more features will be added.

OnlinePrimary is for now a part-time endeavor for Edlin, but it's an interesting experiment in how the Internet could be utilized to power the next generation of primaries and election systems. Tell us what you think below. How else could technology be used to improve the US political system? What other features would you suggest for the site?