Geri Mannion of the Carnegie Corporation, who I should note supports various projects that Mike, Paul, and I do, sent this to me and others today and I wanted to post it in its entirety.

In collaboration with the Funders’ Committee for Civic Participation and with support from Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, and the Open Society Institute, we are writing to let you know about a new tool we have developed to assist voters who may experience problems voting on Tuesday, November 7, 2006. Because of the dramatic increase of electronic voting machines and longstanding concerns about the integrity of the democratic process, we created VoterStory.org, a distributed web “widget” to help record and gather individual voter problems experienced on Election Day.

VoterStory.org is an open source distributed web site widget that we hope you will place on your website for Election Day. It is our hope that this distributed widget will appear across the web and throughout the country so voters who are having trouble can get their story recorded.

As you can see, the tool is designed to document individual instances or stories where a voter is having trouble voting or has been denied the right to vote. Once a “story” is submitted, it will automatically be referred to nonprofit, nonpartisan voter protection organizations that will be standing by to intervene or lend support, if they can. With your participation, we believe VoterStory.org will increase the capacity to address the specific voter problems that may occur on Election Day by organizing the relevant stories and making sure the information is forwarded to the appropriate authorities. Voters using the system will receive an e-mail confirmation and will be registered in a database of election incidents that can be used by numerous groups to document the need for election reforms in the future.

Please visit VoterStory.org to register your organization and help us roll out this important utility. We would appreciate it if you would spread the word to other groups active in this election so they will consider joining this effort. Every voter should be able to go to the polls with the confidence that their vote will count.

With your help, VoterStory.org will play a vital role in protecting voters now and in future elections.