When it comes time to find out how to vote this Election Day, the somewhat sad fact is that trying to get that information from your state election officials is likely to leave you frustrated. A recent Pew study found that state administrators' website are often tough to find, out of date, and simply unhelpful, which leaves local governments are spending money to answer calls for basic voting information at a time when they can hardly spare the cash. Citizens, meanwhile, are left desperate for information. In fact, more than half of the contacts to the 866-OUR-VOTE election protection hotline aren't problem reports at all. They're straightforward questions about navigating the voting process. Read on for six websites that can actually help America vote in 2008.

Giving credit to Obama for the uptick in youth voting, and dissing Rock the Vote; the Internet is making it easier than ever to find information about the candidates; Paul Begala revives the art of the faux-Blackberry email; an Avaaz.org co-founder runs for Congress; Stephen Colbert encourages Hillary and Obama supporters to donate to PA schools; Frank Rich hammers Clinton; 10 Downing Street is Twittering, but Congress forgot about their accounts; and two NC gubernatorial candidates engage in an online debate.

Weighing in at not quite 2 tons of fun, the McCain Girls are tearing up the YouTube charts and shattering a whole lot of eardrums. Are they hip? Do they make John McCain hip? The jury is still out on that.

And while the McCain Girls have racked up more than a half million views in just one week, they are still a good bit shy of the total number times people have watched John McCain sing that old Beach Boy's ditty. Combining the various clips and mash-ups of the ol' hipster singing "Bomb Iran," McCain has been viewed at least 5 million times. More than 1.1 million of those views were of his unedited clip. For my money, though, I prefer Mike Gravel's remake of John Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance" to McCain's surf band homage:

Glenn Greenwald takes Chris Dodd's FISA victory seriously, unlike most of big media; Colin Delany is impressed with the grassroots effort behind Dodd; BlogHer asks why the candidates won't speak with them; a partnership between Rock the Vote and AT&T gets out the vote, text-style; a new site compares the candidates, and Obama and Clinton supporters engage in a Microsoft vs. Apple-style switcher's war.

With a hearty publicity push, MTV has launched think.mtv.com, a community fostering youth advocacy. In much of the coverage of the site, it has described as a youth social network - and while it's true the site has social networking, it's overly reductive to think of it as just that. With the site, MTV hopes to create a content nexus for its target market: young people in high school or college. Co-funded by Viacom and the Case, Gates, Goldhirsh, and MCJ Amelior Foundations, think.mtv.com makes an earnest effort to connect youth networks around relevant problems and interest areas.

Our Voice 2008 is a new, nonpartisan youth politics site that is snap-polling its users on topical issues and providing its users with the means to break down that data by state for display on websites and social networking profiles. But to become useful to campaigns, media outlets, or nonprofits it needs a critical mass.

Matt Stoller looks for ways to organize the netroots against a Hillary Clinton candidacy; a new widget from Rock the Vote makes it easy to create your own voter registration program; James Durban implores conservative groups to back Rock the Vote and steer it away from liberal groups; and Mike Huckabee challenges Fred Thompson to a Lincoln-Douglas debate.

The Web on the Candidates

Matt Stoller is getting excited about Rock the Vote's new API. "Groups and individuals will be able to capture the number of people they register, the data of the people they register, and the contact information of those they register. This means that, unlike with a standard voter registration download form, the person who asked you to register, presumably someone you trust, will be reminding you to vote... It'll be kind of like Actblue, for voter registration." I admit that I've been getting all excited myself about Facebook's new Platform, and this innovation from Rock the Vote fits the bill too -- potentially connecting millions of new people to waves of data to be shared, mashed-up, and used in unforeseen ways.

This weekend Amy Schatz of the Wall Street Journal published a great profile of Chris Hughes, the 23 year-old wunderkind who is one of the three Harvard grads behind Facebook and now works for the Obama campaign. He now pulls 14-hour days working on My.BarackObama.com and translating his expertise about running social networks to helping run the online portion of a presidential campaign. However, "what the Obama campaign wanted wasn't a Facebook clone; the goal is political action, not socializing," Schatz writes. Hughes is therefore in a unique position to turn the social web into the political web. Read the rest.