Next Tuesday's election is an important one, and it is important that U.S. citizens exercise their right to vote. But everywhere you turn, problems have been cropping up: voter registration forms destroyed in Nevada and disallowed in Ohio, the web site for helping US citizens abroad being inaccessible, programs for intimidating and delaying voters in Florida and Ohio, easily hackable electronic voting equipment (running on MS-Windows of course!) with no paper trail, and so forth. Whatever candidates you support, I'm sure most of you find this kind of behavior inexcusable.
Fortunately, a number of groups are taking action to attempt to counteract such atrocities. Election Protection and Votewatch are two such (nonpartisan, in this case) groups. There are a number of other national and local organizations devoted to "get out the vote" (GOTV) to make sure that people who are registered to vote actually go to the polls and vote successfully.
Besides just voting, I think it's terribly important that as many people as possible take the day off of work on Election Day and volunteer to help make sure the election process works by helping get people to the polls and/or monitoring the polls for irregularities. So I highly encourage those reading this to do just that.
After it's all over, if you did end up spending the day helping out, send me an email here and tell me how it went. And let me know if you'd like a chance to get onto the super-secret pre-beta mailing list (with product discount) for the new Mac application I'm working on [subject, of course, to the company's customary beta signup and license agreements]; I'm sure the boss here won't mind putting you on that list if you've been helping to preserve Democracy for America.....
Rock the Vote!
— Dan
P.S. Even if you aren't taking the day off to vote, but you notice something fishy at the polls, please call Election Protection at 1-866-OUR-VOTE to report it. A similar hotline is at 1-866-MY-VOTE-1. Bring these phone numbers with you to the polling place.