While the big media outlets are zooming from one story to the next during their 24 hours a day, nonstop coverage of the Presidential campaign, it has largely been left to others to actually report on events.  Online outfits have filled key portions of this market, with a handful of organizations exceeding all others when it comes to event coverage.  A prime example of this fact is the welcome coverage of ElectionJournal.org - whose detailed reporting on the moving events of Election Day have spread considerable light on a heretofore known but largely unseen aspect of the democratic process.

Many Republicans have already heard the stories about election day shenanigans across the nation in 2004 from campaign workers who were there - like Wisconsin, where busloads of Cheeseheads travelled from polling place to polling place, using the “voucher system” - wherein one local resident known to the polling place workers ‘vouches’ for the authenticity of a person’s residence without other proof, and being permitted to vote.  Also widely rumored were the activities of groups like ACORN, whose members allegedly falsified voter registration forms.  But no one ever saw any of this - it wasn’t on CNN, FOX, or MSNBC so it was written off by some folks as pure partisan BS and rumor-mongering. 

ElectionJournal.org and other similar groups change the dynamic.  Their coverage of the “street level” campaign as it plays out on election days across the nation has been instructive.  They are using all of the modern tools - Twitter, YouTube, Flickr - to track the election as it happens.

The EJ team is in Kentucky this week, where they have already found a voter registered on the 41st floor of a building that isn’t 41 stories tall, voters turned away from a polling place, illegal electioneering inside a polling place, and they are hot on the trail of widespread lies being spread.  Keep checking in with the EJ correspondents throughout the day.

It’s not 1960 Chicago, but it could be.  It seems that some dead folks in Connecticut get up every Election Day, dust themselves off, and go vote.  While certainly more participatory than a lot of living voters, today’s Courant story about the deceased who remain on active voting rolls should surely send shivers down the spine of anyone concerned about the integrity of elections in Connecticut. 

That recorded vote, seven years after her death, puts Drury on a list of more than 300 people across Connecticut who appear to have voted from the grave in elections dating to 1994, a two-month investigation of voting records by journalism students at the University of Connecticut has found.

But before you start to really worry about, you know - the preservation of the Republic and other such small things - the Secretary of the State’s office is on duty:

Kozik, of the secretary of the state’s office, concedes: “There should be a better system of getting the death information to the registrars in a timely fashion. But I’m not exactly sure how we would do that.”

It is assured that the “voter fraud is a myth” crowd will dismiss the report as part of the great sinister plot to create a false boogeyman.  But nonetheless, reports like these, which are manifest across the nation, highlight the need to improve the election system we have in place now to ensure fraud is not part of American elections.

Update: The noted online journal Election Journal.org picked up the Courant story today, as well.