Votifi - of course we can shamelessly self-promote, in the spirit of elections; also the only one of these apps to already be available on Windows8 [iOS] [Win8]

Polltracker - Poll junkies can keep track of all the polls they can humanly swallow with this one, via TalkingPointsMemo [iOS]

Adhawk - Provides funding information about the groups responsible for political ads, from our friends at Sunlight Foundation [iOS] [Android]

SuperPACApp - Similar to Adhawk, but provides additional information regarding the claims that an ad is making [iOS]

FactCheck.org mobile - Not a real app, but a slick, mobile friendly interface that allows you to check facts regarding the Presidential elections

Show of hands - a cool polling app that shows instant feedback on how people are voting around the country [iOS] [Android] [KindleFire]

Know any more good ones? Let us know @votifi and we’ll add to the list

Some cool/creepy tech that’s helping to get out the vote today, via TechCrunch: 

• The Romney Campaign’s Digital Brain: Project Orca
• Organizer, a volunteer and canvasser logistics startup, brings UPS-like logistics to neighborhood get-out-the-vote workers, overlaying a walking path most likely to reach the important fence-sitting voters over a smartphone map.
• Vote With Friends allows users to catagorize their friends into blocs of likely voters and message them with reminders to vote
• Poll-Watcher, which monitors which Democrats stroll into the voting booth and then relays the information back to callers and canvassers, so that limited get-out-the-vote resources can be targeted to those who haven’t voted yet.

We will be pitching at the Reboot America Summit in Washington DC on November 8/9 along with other cool startups like POPVox, Ruck.US, ElectNext and NewsIT. 

The agenda looks fantastic. Steve Case (AOL CEO) is keynoting along with tons of other great speakers from Microsoft, OPower, Troopswap, Personal and the White House. 

If you’re in DC and want to attend you can register here. If you’re going to be there, let us know @votifi and we’d love to meet up. 

For the People: a soon to be released Facebook fantasy politics game

By Lou Aronson

Today we launch a new category on Votifi: FOOD

Says you: “What in the world?!”

Quite simply, or at least it became simple to us when brought to our attention, food dominates politics in a way that very few other topics actually do.  Food cuts across boundaries and issues. Be clear: whether you vote for Obama or Romney, odds are you have eaten something today. And, for-or-against marriage equality? Obamacare? the DREAM Act? Isn’t it always better to discuss over a meal?

This week the Farm Bill comes back up for a vote. 230 years ago (in 1782) Thomas Jefferson observed that Virginia’s wealthy class ate fresh vegetables, but the poor did not, which he said was an “inexcusable” state of affairs. More than 200 years later food inequality is still a sad reality.  A short walk up and down the aisles of Whole Foods compared to a neighborhood grocery store in some parts of Washington DC confirms the myth that the affluent get to eat “good calories” while the poor are stuck with processed food and “empty calories”. In a democracy, eating well has never been a privilege of the masses.

Food matters the way issues matter.

About a month ago we were fortunate enough to meet world famous chef Jose Andres (@chefjoseandres) who asked us one simple question: All things being equal would you rather have a $3 cantaloupe or a $10 one? After giving the obvious answer, he retorted “you want to tell me immigration reform doesn’t matter?”

Clearly we were remiss in thinking that life is all about campaign finance reform, cutting the federal budget deficit, foreign policy and what to do about education reform. Whether it’s buying produce from local farmers over chain supermarkets, questioning the nutrition of your child’s school lunches, or protesting because your Big Gulp is banned in NYC, as Americans we are not only what we eat, but also how we eat.

The Washington Post published an essay tracking the production of a hamburger from start to eventual finish at a July 4th barbeque.  In celebrating America’s independence, however, consuming the average hamburger can be downright un-American. As odd as this sounds the author of that essay, Tracie McMillan (@TMMcMillan), had a great point we should all appreciate.

We offer you a new prism.  A new view to yourself and how politics interacts with your daily lives. 

Here’s to a new take on politics in America and we invite you to start digesting questions in the Food category.

Votifi.com/food

By Ian Rosoff

President Obama, a professed sport fan was hopefully figuring out how to fix the economy this weekend, but perhaps he tuned into HBO to watch the Pacquiao v. Bradley fight. And if he did, he witnessed a clear injustice. The fight was a travesty of judging even by boxing standards, and the decision made conspiracy theorists out of everyone and anyone who saw Pac Man knock Bradley’s head back and to the left.

With so much money on the line sports guy Bill Simmons suggested during his podcast that President Obama should come out against the boxing commission and vow to investigate the possibility of a fixed bout. Simmons may have been joking, but he did touch on one of the president’s advantages over Romney, Obama is the sports guy in this election.  

Obama fills out an NCAA college basketball bracket every year, and ESPN always covers how people are doing against Obama’s picks. He’s an athlete and he often has photo ops shooting hoops.

Romney’s image stands in stark contrast to the President’s. Somehow everyone imagines that Mitt’s favorite sport is polo or yacht racing. At least Romney likes to watch NASCAR with his friends, there’s a sport that his base can connect to. The only problem is that those friends are the car’s owners. 

Republicans have been fond of saying that President Obama is out of touch. This argument can be made convincingly, but not if it’s leveled by Romney, who appears to not follow mainstream sports, remember that republican debate when he said he’d be watching the national championship game that wasn’t on.  

Of course it shouldn’t matter that Romney might not be the biggest sports fan in the world, but it makes the ‘Obama is out of touch’ argument that much harder, especially because Obama loves basketball, football, and baseball. These kinds of distinctions don’t matter at all in terms of who should be our next commander and chief, but they do end up mattering in the minds of voters who watch ESPN not CNN.   

Psychology plays a crucial role in elections and somehow I think Bill Simmons is right, if Obama wanted to rap up the election today he’d simply have to call a press conference and announce that he was setting up a sports Czar who’s sole job was to clean up the sweet science of boxing, and after that the President could challenge Mitt to game of one on one. 

We’ve been thinking about getting on Tumblr for a while but as usual with startups there are always more things to do then there are hours in the day. We had a chance to meet the folks from Tumblr at CampaignTech last week in Washington DC and convinced ourselves that it was now or never. 

We’re looking forward to working on politics and social media with Tumblr. Here’s to the future of micro-blogging :)

The tonnage of political advertising has been increasing ever since the advent of Super PACS. Of the 100s of millions of dollars being raised by the SuperPACs, the vast majority of it (upwards of 95%) is being spent on advertising. It’s the only way to spend money which can’t be used to directly fund campaign activities.

Along with the overall rise in traditional political ad spend (TV, radio, newsprint), 2008 and 2010 saw the utilization of social media for new and innovative campaign marketing strategies.  This started with banner and key word PPC advertising.  It has been migrating to more creative applications. The Obama 2008 campaign took out advertising in the virtual world of 3D gaming. Adweek predicts online political adspend in 2012 will be up nearly 41 percent compared to 2008.

The way politicians and battle for votes is evolving as more and more American’s spend a greater majority of their time online. Obviously Politicians are trying to leverage social media, but they are willing to enter ethical grey areas in order to manipulate users. Newt Gingrich was accused by Gawker of stuffing twitter accounts, and he probably isn’t the only one. Fake accounts can do more than just give the appearance of a strong online following, and that is where their real danger could lay, political spam.

Political advertising tends to trend negative because negative ads are proven effective time and again, but the Internet provides the attractive opportunity for untraceable and libelous attacks on any candidate. Political spam is a recent phenomenon that is infecting the 2012 Republican presidential primary and sits poised to inundate every inbox, facebook news feed and twitter hashtag on the Internet with political attacks this election.

A recent study conducted by Impermium found that potentially 85% of major news outlet readers have been exposed to political spam. The spam comes in the form of inflammatory user comments that are generated by fake accounts. The study posited that 60% of political spam comes from social profiles that show no signs of conventional activity. This is the ultimate form of political guerilla marketing, with total anonymity and zero accountability. The people behind the spam are the same people responsible for the Viagra and the “you just won a free iPad” ads. Impermium compared IP addresses and discovered that the both spam had similar origins. Finding out who actually paid for the ads is probably hard to prove, but it isn’t terribly difficult to deduce whom the interested parties might be.

The comment sections of articles on every online news provider are being filled with ideological propaganda. Every reader consumes the political spam unwittingly, they believe they are getting the opinions of other people just like them, and instead it’s spam bots working for political groups.  The spammed comments are also promoted by other fake accounts thus creating a false sense of popularity for the made up comments. The fake people posting fake stories are doing so at an alarming rate. Facebook, Blogs, and news sites are polluted with up to 200 fake posts an hour ranging in topic from taxes to the possibility that Mitt Romney has family on the moon.  The spam rates pick up around major electoral events like Super Tuesday. Impermium tracked over a three day span 500 negative comments about Mitt Romney alone.  For now these cyber political attacks have been focused on the republican primary, but there is little doubt they will be deployed in the general election as well.

Political strategy is getting more sophisticated every election, it is getting more manipulative and conniving, and the discourse is becoming even more vile. As voters it’s becoming harder to trust anything politicians do or say. Now we have to be on the look out for lies coming from zombie Internet users who could look just like you. The only positive with political spam accounts is that the next time you lose all faith in humanity over somebody’s outrageous comment, take solace in the fact that it very well could be fake.

The impact of sites like Twitter and Facebook on elections is difficult to measure, in large part because metrics like “fans” and “followers” say very little about how ardent the support for a candidate might be among social media followers. It certainly doesn’t say anything about who among that follower base actually votes.

Anyone can click the “like” or “follow” button, but might not care about the messages being tweeted after that.  A candidate whose messages are being scrolled past and ignored is not achieving the success that his “numbers” may suggest.  Instead, it is perhaps instructive to examine other data points to get a better picture of the relationship between a political figure’s social media presence and his or her eventual success at the polls.

When it comes to the Republicans still alive in the GOP race, it is clear that Newt Gingrich, with 1.5 million followers, is the Twitter leader.  Mitt Romney has a meager 270,000 followers; next is Ron Paul with around 200,000. Rick Santorum seems hardly worth mentioning, lagging behind with only 85,000 followers.

The reality of the situation, however, is that Gringrich’s support is a mile wide and an inch deep, as this article on Gawker seems to confirm.

Twitter has a few ways of digging deeper into the strength of a social media following and not getting too hung up on its size.

Statistics such as average retweets per tweet and retweets per follower indicate how engaged your twitter folowers are with the message and campaign.  It’s like going around posting virtual signposts.

For example, despite the fact that Gingrich has more supporters than the next three major candidates combined, he is third in average number of re-tweets per tweet (45). Ron Paul leads with around 80 retweets per tweet and Romney is second at 50.

Retweets per follower tells an even more interesting story. Again, Paul is first, but Santorum is second with Romney and Gingrich third and fourth respectively. In looking at this metric, we see that, although not as many tweets are being retweeted, the [sometimes small number of] followers are dedicated to spreading the message of their favored candidate.  This, perhaps more than any other statistic, comes close to quantifying or ranking a candidate’s true level of support.

The more advanced Twitter statistics also seem to back up the claim that Twitter users engage more with Paul, Romney, and Santorum than they do with Gingrich.  Gingrich also stacks up poorly in mentions per hour and followers per mention.

Obviously it’s impossible to know how Twitter statistics will correspond to election results, but increasingly, campaign battles are fought via Twitter and Facebook, so an understanding of a candidate’s successes and failures in social media can give insight into how politics might be transformed by the Internet and technology.

Walksheet.com mentioned us in a blog post today about websites that can help you get more involved in politics this election year. Hudson Baird authored the piece looking at three categories of political websites/apps:

1. Get the facts

2. Support your favorite candidate and

3. Talk to elected officials.

Votifi landed in category one alongside: Politics in Stereo, ElectNext and BallotBook.

The ecosystem of companies looking to impact and disrupt the political process is getting interesting. In 2008 President Obama’s campaign was itself the most disruptive force. For that matter everything prior to 2008 was about helping campaigns to organize themselves better and mobilize supporters to some form of action.  Now it looks like there are a lot of services designed to empower the citizen/voter instead of just the candidate.