The order comes as voting offices experienced an enormous crush of requests for ballots that they’ve been unable to process. One county alone has more than 2,000 requests for electronic ballots to process, according to this story from the Bergen Record.

The one deadline voters still have to meet by today is to get their requests in to their local county clerk’s office by 5 pm today local time.

Election officials have until noon on Friday to process all those requests. Filled-out ballots had previously been expected by no later than 8 pm tonight. The extension gives voters an additional 72 hours to get them turned in.

It’s hard to know exactly how many voters have been displaced by Hurricane Sandy, which stormed through the Northeast last Monday, killing more than 100 people, causing severe damage in many coastal communities and knocking out power to millions of households, including much of New York City.

But the extension essentially means that New Jersey’s final vote tally won’t be known until the weekend at the earliest. While the result of the presidential race there is reasonably assured — President Obama is expected to carry the state and its 14 electoral votes — there’s a Senate race and numerous local and state offices being contested as well.

Gov. Chris Christie, who’s turned into a bit of a bipartisan political superhero during the crisis, said that the number of people requesting electronic ballots should actually be small and that most voters should opt instead to show up at the nearest polling place in person. As quoted by the Record: “If you haven’t been displaced by the storm, get your butt up and go vote at your polling place.”

First there are the technical issues. People requesting voting instructions by email are reporting that they’re receiving bounce-backs, and have been complaining about it on Twitter and Facebook. See these tweets I pulled from NJ.com’s Storify page. County offices are being overwhelmed with electronic requests, and can’t keep up with the demand in getting responses back to voters.

So the email ballot option in NJ isn’t working out so well. Emails are bouncing back due to full inboxes :-/ #Vote2012 #NJVote

November 6, 2012 10:00 am via TweetCaster for AndroidReplyRetweetFavorite

@EssDot323

Steph Boogs

@BrianLehrer @pollwatchusa #njvote I faxed&emailed vote by fax app 12am mon.No reply from Essex clerk.their inbox is now full&lines r busy

November 6, 2012 10:10 am via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@Jemour

Dr. Jemour Maddux

disenfranchised thanks to Hudson County being 100% unprepared for Christie’s “email voting.” Thanks New Jersey. #NJVote

November 6, 2012 10:39 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@thetrashsalad

Abbey

They’re also going to have a hard time counting the electronic votes that do come in. Despite the state government’s best intentions to make poll access as flexible as possible under the circumstances, the whole thing appears to be suffering from the lack of time to make it all happen, which is about zero.

And already there’s been an emergency appeal by the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey asking a court to intervene. The ACLU is reportedly asking the judge to allow affected voters to cast ballots via the Federal Voting Assistance Program.

For all the anecdotal complaints arising on Twitter and elsewhere, there are examples where it appears to have worked for some people:

#njvote: Someone had her mail-in ballot returned YESTERDAY, thought she couldn’t vote. County said scan, send by 8pm. #NJ making it work!

November 6, 2012 10:23 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@MeganCarolan

Megan Carolan

Now on to the more troubling reports. There has been at least one report of a bit of malware that may be targeting voters in Sandy-struck areas. As GFI Labs notes, one is a file named electioncard1.exe, which is made to look like a regular document file. It is instead an executable file that contains the Rotinom.b Trojan. And that’s just one of them.

Here, via Stephen Colbert, is one last conversation with the Internet’s political man of the moment, before today’s results either enshrine or embarrass him.

Actually, here are two clips. First Colbert does a nice job of setting up the threat the New York Times stats geek poses to the punditocracy. In short, if he’s right, he will have publicly depantsed them, which they are not excited about:

And here’s a five-minute chat with Silver and Colbert, in which Silver comes out as pro-Ebola. Colbert really does a nice job of pushing Silver in a thoughtful way:

Gov. Chris Christie has ordered counties to provide ways for people who have been displaced by Hurricane Sandy to vote in Tuesday’s election by fax and email. The system will follow in part a similar scheme developed for New Jersey residents serving overseas in the military to cast their ballots.

To say that no one is going to be happy with the result, no matter what it is, is probably understating it. To the extent that the process is understood — it was at this writing still in the process of being implemented — it will work like this.

On Election Day, those who have not yet taken advantage of early voting opportunities must by 5 pm local time print and return either by email or fax an Electronic Ballot Application. (Some counties are using or accepting other forms. See this story at NJ.com for more on that.) Once you’ve filled out and returned that form, you’ll get a response with instructions for how to vote, a secrecy waiver form and a ballot, all of which must be returned by 8 pm local time.

Military personnel are required to file a paper ballot by mail after sending an electronic vote, but right now there is some lack of clarity as to whether or not that will be required of displaced email and fax voters.

Alternately, if you are displaced, you can still vote in person by finding the nearest polling place and voting with a provisional ballot.

Laying aside the obvious fact that many people in New Jersey have more immediate concerns — staying warm, staying fed, rebuilding their lives in the wake of the disaster — the opportunities for difficulty and the risk of problems are, in theory, numerous.

Voting via the Internet can be done successfully when there is sufficient infrastructure in place to support it. The nation of Estonia, a former Soviet Republic, has allowed electronic voting since 2005 when it launched a pilot project to coincide with some municipal elections. That year only 9,800 people, or less than 2 percent of the more than 1 million eligible voters, voted electronically. Last year, the figure had risen above 140,000, or more than 15 percent of eligible voters.

Estonia has something that New Jersey doesn’t: A mandatory smart card ID. It looks like a state drivers license with a chip in it. The chip contains a set of cryptographic keys used to protect and authenticate the stored data, which includes the name, gender and other information about the person.

Email is by its nature inherently insecure. It can be spoofed, hacked, used to introduce malware into a target system and as the delivery mechanism for numerous other very bad things. There are an awful lot of people who work in the computer security business who will recoil at the very idea of the sanctity of democracy in New Jersey being entrusted to email.

There are additional security concerns: The servers receiving the votes will be connected to the Internet, and therefore vulnerable to remote attack. Shared computers in libraries and community centers where displaced people might vote will not have been properly secured in a way that will guarantee against tampering.

And even if secured in some way, what’s to stop some digital trouble makers — like, say, Anonymous to name but one — from launching a disruptive denial of service attack on some unsuspecting county, or indeed the entire state, as a way of proving some inane ideological point? The mind reels at all the ways that this could go wrong.

But let’s focus for a minute on what could go right. Despite the protestations of certain politically affiliated groups who would have you believe that voter fraud is a pervasive and widespread problem on a national scale, the American voting system tends to work pretty well. If you accept that the potential for voter fraud exists within a system that is far from perfect, people have tended not to take advantage of it. A five-year federal inquiry into voter fraud that ended in 2007 found that it happens so rarely as to be statistically non-existent.

Voting via traditional methods is by and large an honor system. Every time I stand in line at a polling place clutching my state drivers license and passport just in case, I’m always surprised that I rarely have to show it. New York is not a state with a voter-I.D. law. Neither is New Jersey. So when a person shows up at the proper polling place and his or her name appears on the list of registered voters, that person is allowed to vote. That same presumption of honesty should be broadly applied here, under the circumstances.

There will be losers, and they will be unhappy and will likely challenge the result. They will probably resort to the courts and demand complicated recounts if the results in various races are close. Nationally, New Jersey is not a swing state and it’s essentially a given that President Obama can count on winning its 14 electoral votes. The challenges will likely come in statewide and local races, but this is what courts are for: Settling disputes.

Barring a technical failure — the risk of which is admittedly real — there is no reason that electronic voting, selected as probably the least bad of a series of bad options, cannot be effective.

But the situation in New Jersey raises the question about why the voting process hasn’t modernized with the rest of society. New Jersey has become an unwilling test case to see if Internet voting can work in the country that invented the Internet.

In 2008, a group of well-known singers crafted the music video, “Yes, We Can” to support the then fresh-faced Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Now, as the days to the election count down and things are a little dicier for Obama, here is the 2012 effort, titled “Forward.”

Less star-studded than the last one, it features Ne-Yo, Herbie Hancock and Natasha Bedingfield in a “grassroots effort to motivate and inspire nationwide voter participation.”

Here is the new one and the 2008 one, too (it’s better):

Here’s her question, which you can find on page 48 of the transcript:

Crowley: Mr. President, we have a really short time for a quick discussion here. IPad, the Macs, the iPhones, they are all manufactured in China, and one of the major reasons is labor is so much cheaper [there]. How do you convince a great American company to bring that manufacturing back here?

The correct answer is that, under current conditions, which are highly unlikely to change no matter who is president, the job of assembling iPhones and iPads and other consumer electronics is now done mostly in China by companies that specialize in manufacturing, and will never come back to the U.S. And that’s okay.

Sadly, both Obama and Romney flubbed their answers, and educated voters not at all.

Romney made his response about how China is a currency manipulator and steals American intellectual property. Obama got started down the right path, correctly admitting that certain low-skilled jobs aren’t coming back, and mentioned “high-wage, high-skilled jobs.” But he failed to close the deal on his point. He then got off track talking about investing in research and training engineers. In part because the time was so short, neither delivered a clear correct answer about an issue that is widely and fundamentally misunderstood by most voters.

Here’s what one of them — either one, I don’t care which, and assuming no time limit — should have said in response:

“Candy, I understand how some people might get frustrated when they see Chinese workers assembling iPhones. It’s easy to think that those jobs rightly belong in America. The reality is a little more complex, but when you understand it, there’s a surprising amount of good news for American workers.

“The fact is, assembling iPhones and iPads is the final step of a complex process, and is really a low-skill, low-cost kind of job. China has spent decades building much of its economy around these low-skill jobs, in part because it has such a large labor force and plenty of workers who are willing to do the work. And, frankly, here in America you wouldn’t want to try to support a family on the kind of wages a job like that would pay. I know it sounds harsh, but it’s true. So I know this may sound odd when I say it, but I ask you to hear me out: I’m perfectly comfortable letting those kinds of jobs go to China or somewhere else.

“In fact, some researchers at the University of California at Berkeley found that for every iPad or iPhone manufactured, Chinese workers add $10 or less to the value of an iPad or iPhone. On an iPad, they found that American workers add $162 worth of value, and on an iPhone it was more than twice as much.

“In America, when we talk about manufacturing, we should be talking about advanced manufacturing jobs for highly skilled workers that require a solid education and pay wages on which you can support a family. And the fact is, there’s a lot of American work that goes into an iPad or an iPhone or a Mac.

“For one thing, there’s our semiconductor companies, like Intel, an American company that makes the most advanced and complex device ever created — the microprocessor — and that does it better than any other company in the world. It makes the primary brain that goes inside the Mac, most of the world’s personal computers and most of the servers that power the Internet. And most of those chips are made right here in California and Arizona and Oregon. Some are made in Israel, too. But most are made here in the U.S.A.

“And the microprocessors that go inside the iPad and the iPhone are made right here in America, too. Apple doesn’t make its own chips, and when it went looking for another company to help it do that, it picked a Korean company called Samsung. And where did Samsung decide to build these chips? Some place in Korea? No. The answer will surprise you: Texas. That’s right. Samsung operates one of its very biggest chip factories in Austin.

“Then there’s the shatter-resistant glass that you touch every time you use an iPhone or iPad. It was invented in America. And it’s made in America, too, by American workers at a company called Corning, in Kentucky and New York.

“And that’s just one piece of it. There are a lot of other great jobs held by American workers. Apple has a lot of smart designers who sweated over every little detail of how the iPad and iPhone look, and how they feel in your hand, and how the button works. Teams of software developers slowly, painstakingly designed and built and tweaked and refined the software that makes it so fun and useful.

“And we’re not done there. If you have an iPhone or an iPad, you have a favorite app. Right now, my favorite app is the one created by my campaign staff. And when I take a break on the campaign bus, my wife and I like to relax for a few minutes playing Words With Friends. She beats me every time. And how many apps are there? A million? A zillion? But that’s an example of another American company, Zynga, creating jobs for the people who create game software. And there are lots more Zyngas, some of them really small companies with just a few people, and some a lot bigger. Apple once counted, and said that there were more than 200,000 people working at jobs just making apps.

“And let’s not forget that just a little more than five years ago, this branch of the technology industry didn’t exist at all. Apple brought out the first iPhone in 2007, and the first apps started coming to the marketplace in 2008. And don’t get me started about Google and its Android phones and tablets, and the chips and software that go into those. Or Facebook, and all the interesting things it’s doing.

“So, to answer your question, Candy, I’m not terribly worried that American workers aren’t assembling iPhones and iPads in America. They’re busy doing more important jobs, and earning good wages doing it right here in America. And as president, I’ll do everything in my power to help encourage the creation of more jobs right here in America, and to encourage entrepreneurs to start new companies so they can create the next Apple or Google or Intel or Facebook.

“It’s something we in America do better than anyone else. And we can argue about the details of how we should go about doing that. My opponent and I have some strong differences of opinion on some of those things we might do, and you should learn about those differences and think long and hard about them, because they’re important. But, over the long term, when I look at the iPhone and the iPad, I see something that could only have happened in America. And I feel pretty good about the role the American worker plays in it. And so should you.

“Next question.”

=====
Update: A few people have pointed out that President Obama in his response to Crowley’s question got off to a better start than I initially gave him credit for. However, I don’t think he quite closed the deal on the argument. Then, owing I think in part to the tight time constraints, he got off track. Either way, I’ve adjusted that lead-in paragraph above to reflect this.

For the sake of discussion I’ve added the text of the full exchange below.

CROWLEY: Mr. President, we have a really short time for a quick discussion here.
IPad, the Macs, the iPhones, they are all manufactured in China, and one of the major reasons is labor is so much cheaper [there]. How do you convince a great American company to bring that manufacturing back here?

ROMNEY: The answer is very straightforward. We can compete with anyone in the world as long as the playing field is level. China’s been cheating over the years, one, by holding down the value of their currency, number two, by stealing our intellectual property, our designs, our patents, our technology. There’s even an Apple store in China that’s a counterfeit Apple store selling counterfeit goods. They hack into our computers. We will have to have people play on a fair basis. That’s number one.

Number two, we have to make America the most attractive place for entrepreneurs, for people who want to expand a business. That’s what brings jobs in. The president’s characterization of my tax plan …

OBAMA: How much time you got, Candy?

ROMNEY: …. is completely … is completely false.

CROWLEY: Let me go to the president here, because we really are running out of time. And the question is can we ever get — we can’t get wages like that. It can’t be sustained here.

OBAMA: Candy, there are some jobs that are not going to come back, because they’re low-wage, low-skill jobs. I want high-wage, high-skill jobs. That’s why we have to emphasize manufacturing. That’s why we have to invest in advanced manufacturing. That’s why we’ve got to make sure that we’ve got the best science and research in the world.

And when we talk about deficits, if we’re adding to our deficit for tax cuts for folks who don’t need them and we’re cutting investments in research and science that will create the next Apple, create the next new innovation that will sell products around the world, we will lose that race. If we’re not training engineers to make sure that they are equipped here in this country, then companies won’t come here. Those investments are what’s going to help to make sure that we continue to lead this world economy not just next year, but 10 years from now, 50 years from now, a hundred years from now.

That’s not changing anytime soon. But here’s a way to push through the so-called “filter bubble” to look at a broader audience and get a more qualified take on who’s saying what. The political start-up Votizen has put together a site called Votizen Live that cross-checks political tweets against voter registration records and shows what Democrat, Republican and independent voters are tweeting about.

In addition to the stream of tweets, Votizen posts live analytics about political tweet activity trends. Its latest data shows that there are more Democrat tweets altogether, but far more Republican tweets than Democrat in swing states like Florida and Ohio.

Might be a good tool to drop in on next time all the yelling muddles your brain.

Over the past four years, it has become evident that the town hall of American government has moved online and into the social arena. Public officials in every corner of government — not just politicians — are expanding their use of social media to better understand and communicate with today’s digital citizens.

With an estimated 107 million Twitter users in the United States and another 156 million Americans using Facebook, more and more people expect real-time access and authentic engagement with everything from the brands they love to the governments they elect. In fact, according to a survey by Accenture of citizens in seven countries, including the United States, 50 percent believe that being able to interact digitally with government would encourage them to become more engaged and would make government more transparent.

Recognizing the opportunity to engage the digital generation in the democratic process, the state of Washington took the unprecedented step in July of becoming the first U.S. state to allow eligible residents to register to vote in this year’s election through Facebook. The secure registration process Washington developed clearly signals the collapse of the last few barriers to the public acceptance of social media as a critical — and secure — medium for government communications. In addition to increasing voter participation, the new process will require no printing, signing or mailing of forms to a state office — saving both time and state resources. Today, government is using social media to register voters, but soon we may see actual voting via Facebook, and the opportunity to become a truly digital democracy.

While encouraging, the state of Washington is unfortunately not the norm. In the same Accenture study that found a majority of Americans want greater social engagement from their government, fewer than half of the respondents believe their government has effectively leveraged social and digital platforms to ease access to public services. While major consumer brands are busy trying to meet the challenges of the social marketplace, most public-sector efforts lag behind citizen expectations. After Y2K, governments turned to “e-government” to dramatically improve their efficiency and effectiveness, building online portals to dispense important information about public services. However, the fundamental aspiration of Gov. 2.0 — a more personal, convenient and empowering interaction, a social contract with citizens — was not realized.

Even when government agencies decide to engage, most “social” programs are still relegated to one-way information broadcasting and sporadic individual use by officials. But mobility has brought us to a tipping point, and social engagement is the next frontier. The good news is that there are many other good examples to emulate.

In 2011, for example, FEMA officials were able to monitor social media conversations and respond to tornado disaster reports in Joplin, Mo., from citizens on the ground before official reports could be verified. And, in Boulder, Colo., real-time social communications between citizens and government through Facebook and Twitter helped save lives and property as a wildfire raged in 2010.

New York City has re-engineered a tool from the analog era — 311 — into a leading social media support system to facilitate more efficient citizen interaction with city government and reduce public services spending. Leveraging Twitter and Facebook from a mobile device, residents can use NYC 311 to request pothole repair or report graffiti simply by attaching a photo and hitting the send button. The system shortens government response time, reduces costs and deepens the connection between citizens and local government.

The federal government also has begun leveraging the connectivity of social media to streamline government and save taxpayer money. A good example is an innovative program called the SAVE Award (Securing Americans Value and Efficiency), which effectively crowd sources cost-saving ideas from federal employees on how to ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent wisely. Since introducing the program in 2009, federal employees have submitted more than 56,000 cost-cutting ideas.

Social media applications are used very effectively throughout the private sector to trim costs and improve efficiency. Cisco, for example, says it has been able to reach 90 times the audience for a key router it produces at one-sixth the cost through social channels.

Imagine the potential savings and insights that government could generate by having an ongoing online dialogue with citizens. Getting there would require funding for the tools, training, analytics and measurement needed, but there’s no doubt, in this era of continued belt tightening, that social media could render a positive return on investment.

Government agencies can start now by taking three steps:

• First, they should conduct a bottom-up assessment to determine how best to leverage social media to serve the unique needs of their constituents. Agencies at every government level should review programs and practices built for the offline era to determine how the social marketplace can reshape their service offerings for the next decade.
• Next, government workforces must be given the tools necessary to create two-way integration, especially those under 30 who prefer to communicate through social channels. They must be trained in all relevant digital technology to be ready for the next phase of citizen communication.
• Finally, governments should solicit direct feedback from the public through free tools like Facebook and Twitter. This type of “digital democracy” enables citizens to make recommendations in real time and to play a leading role in shaping everything from public policy to public services.

Increased transparency through social media at all levels of government can deepen the connection with the public, instill a greater sense of trust and drive increased citizen participation. With a majority of Americans seeking more social interaction with their government, and the potential for increased efficiency and cost savings, social engagement will help create the public services for the future that digital citizens demand and deserve.

Stephen J. Rohleder is group chief executive for Accenture’s global Health & Public Service business.

In another high-profile parry in its increasingly aggressive proxy fight against Yahoo, activist shareholder Third Point has launched an extensive Web blog to support its case with investors called “Value Yahoo.”

Along with a long statement — a blogifesto of sorts — about what it will take to fix the Silicon Valley Internet giant, Value Yahoo also tries to keep up the pressure on Yahoo’s board and management.

The purple-themed site — this is Yahoo’s well-known color — features a humorous take on Yahoo’s now dearly departed neon sign in San Francisco, with the banner: “Yahoo Shareholders Deserve Overdue Representation!”

It includes a section on “Failed Leadership,” info on its “Road to Recovery” slate of alternate directors and even an FAQ and mission statement.

“We believe in Yahoo!, its loyal users, committed employees, dedicated partners, and the potential of the brand,” it reads, in part. “Yahoo! shareholders, employees, and partners have suffered for too long with a revolving door of management teams and Directors who have been unable to seize opportunities despite the Company’s enduring role as the premier online source for news, sports, business, entertainment and email.”

By the way, in a clever dig, there is also a Facebook site for Value Yahoo — patent lawsuit or no, you can “like” Third Point’s effort.

Here, for example, is one of Value Yahoo’s charticles:

The goal of all this, presumably, is to get Yahoo to give in to demands for several board seats using its directors, including Third Point’s Dan Loeb. So far, ongoing discussions between Loeb and Yahoo have failed to stop the shareholder battle, which comes in the midst of the company’s wrenching restructuring.

Last week, Yahoo said it had appointed three new directors to its board. In a pointed slap at Loeb, the company said it had rejected him specifically, although Yahoo added that it was willing to accept one of his current choices and another that was mutually agreed to.

Loeb reacted to that, um, badly, with another letter last week that said Yahoo leadership was living in an “illogical Alice-in-Wonderland world.”

The war of words continues with the new site, which Third Point said it will maintain actively like a blog, with updates, charts, filings, outside news stories and more.

(Since Yahoo has apparently banned me from its internal news offering to employees, according to more sources than you can shake a stick at, I hope they can see my work here!)

In its newest post — titled “Why Are We Running for Election to the Yahoo! Board?” — Third Point presents an argument for other shareholders to act, even though Yahoo has actually made a lot of the changes that Loeb has been pushing for already.

(In fact, that’s an FAQ question on Value Yahoo, natch: “Yahoo! has made changes to its Board. Hasn’t Third Point already gotten what it wanted?” Short answer: Vigilance, since they are well-known backsliders over there!)

As the firm notes in its reasons-why essay, with the original bolding on the Value Yahoo blog:

“After years of failed leadership and poor governance, Yahoo! shareholders have a chance to inject experienced, independent voices aligned with their interests. The “Shareholder Slate” — Daniel Loeb, Harry Wilson, Michael Wolf, and Jeff Zucker — seeks a voice and a choice for Yahoo! owners hurt by the current “Legacy Board’s” track record of value disintegration, and wants to prevent the Board from simply nominating their handpicked replacements — the “Insider Slate” — for Yahoo!’s board.”

A great deal of this campaigning takes place in the traditional media forums: TV, radio, local newspapers, and voters occasionally get to meet the candidates in person.

But even more of this takes place on the Web. Practically every political ad that runs on a television screen anywhere in the country is also placed on YouTube and promoted on Twitter and Facebook. So are speeches and debates. This is good for voters who don’t watch a lot of TV, so they can go back and evaluate what candidates says and make a judgement about them on their own time.

That is, if you can get to them. For most Americans, access to a solid broadband Internet connection is as readily available as an electrical connection, and only a phone call away. But for roughly a third of the country, it’s not so easy. That means that about a third of the nation’s population is less able to participate in the democratic process the way the rest of us do.

That, to me, is a troubling thought, when I consider the nation’s broadband-adoption problem. It basically comes down to this: Lower-populated rural areas and some inner-city areas don’t have the same access to the Internet that most Americans take almost for granted. Cable and phone companies often opt not to build the infrastructure needed in certain lightly populated areas, because they can’t justify the investment.

When he came into office in 2009, one cornerstone of President Obama’s technology policy concerned correcting this via grants included in the economic stimulus package. In 2010, Obama delivered the National Broadband Plan. And last year, the president talked to Congress about his hopes to bring broadband to 98 percent of the country, and using wireless technology to do it.

Little has worked. A new study, out today from TechNet, a tech-industry lobbying group, says that broadband adoption at the national level has plateaued at 68 percent of the population, only slight higher than the 65 percent it was when Obama became president.

What happened? Lots of people and organizations with great ideas emerged to try and tackle the problem, the report finds. But they all suffer from a severe lack of coordination, and wildly different visions of what the outcome should be. “Stakeholders are flying blind when it comes to understanding best practices to improve broadband adoption …” the report reads. It goes on to say, “To the extent that poor policy coordination hampers efforts to increase broadband adoption, we run the risk of having a less inclusive society, a smaller domestic market for tech goods and services, and a less innovative economy.”

One problem is simple demographics: A 2011 survey by the government’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration found that only 43 percent of households earning $25,000 or less had broadband at home, and that only 46 percent of those with less than a high school diploma have it.

Then there’s the economy. A Pew survey found that 9 percent of people who at one time had broadband had cut their service off during the previous 12 months because of economic concerns. And that figure rose to more than 16 percent of people earning $30,000 a year or less.

There are apparently historical precedents for this sort of thing. During the Great Depression, telephone adoption dropped from 42 percent in 1929 to 31 percent in 1934. Electrical service leveled off at 67 percent during the Depression, and didn’t resume climbing until later.

A lot of people think that this same demographic just uses smartphones instead, but the data in the report shows that’s not the case generally, and if you added “smartphone-only” users to broadband users, you still end up with only a 73 percent adoption rate.

And this cost of “digital exclusion,” TechNet finds, is more than just participation in the election process. Employers increasingly require that applications for jobs be filed online. Healthcare is increasingly tracked online. Even just taking advantage of good deals on Groupon or LivingSocial more or less implies broadband access.

What to do? Get everyone on the same page, for one thing. The report suggests getting the numerous federal and state efforts pulling in one direction on such aspects of the problem as collecting reliable data, and setting an agreed-upon set of best practices.

There’s also the option of leaving well enough alone. Demographics have a way of shifting over time. Old people who don’t bother with broadband will die, and younger people who can’t imagine living without it will either demand it where they live or move to places where they can get it. As I learned in 2008 when I wrote this story for Businessweek, sometimes that can be as easy as moving to the other side of a street. Sometimes it’s just a matter of waiting for the cable company to offer service in your area.

My guess is that this is a problem that’s not going to easily solve itself with a market-based approach, but so far the government-based options aren’t looking so good, either.

And in 2012 — which also happens to be the 10th anniversary of the confab of tech and media titans — it’s already shaping up to be another fantastic event in terms of programming, with a lineup of onstage appearances that is sure to make some news.

There are many more very big names to come, but Walt Mossberg and I are pleased to introduce the first group of interviewees, which will give you a glimpse into the firepower we expect at D10 in late May. It is again being held in Rancho Palos Verdes, just south of Los Angeles.

The initial speakers we have confirmed so far include: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; serial entrepreneur Sean Parker, who will appear with Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek; Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus; Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz; LinkedIn Chairman and VC Reid Hoffman, who will appear with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner; and Skype CEO Tony Bates.

It’s hard to imagine someone we have wanted to have onstage more than Michael Bloomberg, a man of many talents and interests. He’s known worldwide as the 108th Mayor of the City of New York. First elected in November 2001 (and again in 2005 and 2009), he is also one of the most compelling politicians in the U.S. today.

But Bloomberg is also a pioneer in terms of the business of digital news and information technology, having built a huge and groundbreaking media company and information service. Bloomberg (the company) has 310,000 subscribers to its financial news and information service, and more than 15,000 employees worldwide.

There will be a lot to talk about with him, from the upcoming presidential election to the state of our government to the future of innovation, news and technology.

Also sure to be voluble is Sean Parker, the legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has been on the cutting edge of innumerable important digital trends of the recent decade. In 1999, Parker co-founded Napster, the controversial and industry-changing music service, at the age of 19.

He followed up with early contact information service Plaxo, and then shifted over to his critical involvement as founding president of Facebook in its early days as a start-up, an experience which was dramatized in the movie “The Social Network.” Parker continued to found and also invest in companies, from Causes to Spotify to his most recent, Airtime, a social video company that he is doing with his Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning.

Parker will be appearing onstage with Daniel Ek, another serial entrepreneur and technologist, who started his first company in 1997 at the age of 14. The Swedish native later co-founded online music phenom Spotify in 2006, with Martin Lorentzon.

The former CTO of Stardoll and founder of Advertigo leads a company that is changing the way music is delivered and consumed by fans, against a backdrop of intense change in the industry, succeeding even as a plethora of other services have stumbled.

Also a groundbreaker is Zynga CEO and founder Mark Pincus, yet another serial entrepreneur, whose latest effort in the online gaming arena has finally resulted in his biggest success. It recently went public, and now has a nearly $10 billion market cap.

Before founding Zynga in 2007, Pincus had already started three other companies: Push start-up Freeloader in 1995; automated tech-support company Support.com after that; and early social networking site Tribe.net in 2003.

(I met Pincus when he was at Freeloader in Washington, D.C., while writing a profile of him for the Washington Post, so I have enjoyed tracking his progress since then.)

Pincus is also an avid angel investor, with early stakes in Napster, Brightmail, Twitter and Facebook.

Reid Hoffman was another early investor in Facebook, along with many of Web 2.0’s most successful ventures. Well-known in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur and VC, and recently dubbed the “start-up whisperer” by the New York Times (although I am not sure exactly what that means), he’s also chairman of LinkedIn, the business-networking service that also recently went public (at a $10 billion valuation, too).

He’ll appear with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, who started out life in Hollywood, but soon made his way to Silicon Valley as a top exec at Yahoo. After running its media division, Weiner spent a short time at venture firms before going operational again at LinkedIn.

What it takes to build and maintain momentum as tech companies move into more mature stages, as well as how the social networking space evolves, are among the many topics on tap for the pair.

The evolution of a start-up phenom — in this case, Internet telephony service Skype — will be among the topics covered by Tony Bates, who is now a president at Microsoft, which bought it last year.

As such, he is responsible, says the software giant in its description of his job, “for overseeing the company’s direction, strategy and overall mission to become a global communications service that will eventually reach billions of users.”

That’s a tall order for Bates, who came to Skype from a top job at Cisco. Bates has deep roots (or maybe, routing?) in the guts of the Internet, having done backbone-engineering strategy for Internet MCI. The U.K. native also holds nine patents.

Lastly, given all the activity we expect will happen between government regulatory agencies and tech companies over the next few years, we felt it was key to bring in FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz. He has been at the FTC as a commissioner since 2004, but was given the top job by President Barack Obama in 2009.

Among his priorities, according to his bio, is “promoting competition and innovation in the technology sector through law enforcement and policy initiatives; and protecting consumers’ privacy — especially while they are using the Internet.”

Uh-oh!

Leibowitz knows from regulation, having served as the Democratic chief counsel and staff director for the U.S. Senate Antitrust Subcommittee from 1997 to 2000, where he focused on competition policy and telecommunications matters, as well as a similar stint at the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism and Technology before that.

There will be a lot more speakers to come, of course. But, so far, we think D10 is off and running fast.

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1. The rise of BODM (build once, deploy many) platforms

   Mobile platform fragmentation is growing — the broad range of platforms currently encompasses iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Bada, Symbian, Kindle and Nook, just to name a few. The result has been a wave of “build once, deploy many” platforms to create and distribute mobile applications, which will continue to grow in popularity as developers and content creators simply forgo the onerous task of building something unique for each mobile platform.

   According to a 2011 Nielsen Smartphone analytics report, Android users spend nearly an hour a day interacting with apps and the Web on their phones, with apps (67 percent) accounting for nearly twice the amount of time as the Web (33 percent). Bearing this consumption profile in mind, the economics of mobile content doesn’t encourage investment in new mobile development platforms as long as monetization doesn’t scale with these costs. In other words, developers won’t want to spend more on developing their app while the revenue they bring in is modestly incremental or flat.

   Among the most well-known platforms are PhoneGap, Spaceport.io (a.k.a. Siblingz, Inc.) for games and Appcelerator, the latter of which has already had more than 30,000 apps built using its platform. The approach of some of these services is that they enable developers to unlock the value of mobile web development with native app wrappers. However, a more challenging platform fragmentation problem has been largely ignored: unlocking app development for non-technical consumers and independent content creators through a compelling graphical user interface (GUI).

   Presently, non-technical content creators are disenfranchised from mobile app development unless they invest, usually unprofitably, in mobile web and app development services, or they learn to code outright.

   One company, kleverbeast, is tackling this challenge. Having already signed up prominent beta enterprise customers and non-technical content creators, kleverbeast is empowering digital app publishing across iOS, Android, and other emerging platforms with a compelling native user experience for their app owners’ audiences. The unique technology and market strategy has helped kleverbeast address mobile platform fragmentation, not just for developers, but also for the benefit of the average consumer.

   This new breed of BODM companies will proliferate in 2012, and I expect more than a million apps and game titles will choose this path.

2. Angel funding valve tightens and IPO mafias move into the picture

   Angel investing has risen in popularity over the past two years, but the long tail of unproven individual angels will wane as two events unfold: (1) Many angel-funded start-ups will go belly-up, unable to secure Series A financing or a bridge loan, and (2) institutional investors will adroitly strong-arm early, passive investors.

   Angel dollars widen the capital base available to entrepreneurs in early tech start-ups opening the door to tech innovation. However, many of these new angel investors don’t realize that frequently they will be squeezed down on their ownership percentage in subsequent rounds of financing and face less favorable terms. Many fresh angels have assumed greater risk than is commensurate with their early ownership and expected more upside than they end up getting. Subsequently, some angels won’t have the capital to diversify their portfolios or participate in follow-up rounds of financing.

   Investing can be risky for many fresh angels hungry to keep up with the Joneses and raise their social capital. As these lessons are learned, angel investing will swing back to some rational levels.

   The flipside of this may be the next IPO mafias. Expect a new crop of angel investors to emerge from some of those who benefited from Groupon, Zynga and the much-anticipated Facebook IPO. These IPO angels will take over early-stage deals and fund employees from these successful brands that decide to go it on their own. Ex-Googlers fund ex-Googlers all the time, and the mafias of tech titans will continue to proliferate.

3. One great new mobile social media company will be born out of the U.S. election cycle of 2012

   In 2008, President Barack Obama was widely praised for his mobile marketing prowess, which many political strategists evangelized as contributing to his victory in the election and igniting the youth base to get out and vote.

   Campaign managers utilized a combination of social and mobile media vehicles, with several businesses benefiting as a result: from ad networks like Quattro Wireless (acquired by Apple in 2010), to start-up companies like CommerceTel, which powered the President’s interactive voice applications.

   Adding weight to this trend are emerging consumer behaviors over social networks and the power of indirect, viral outreach. A study conducted by SocialVibe revealed that “94 percent of social media users of voting age engaged by a political message watched the entire message, and 39 percent of those people shared it with an average of 130 friends.” Powerful, period.

   The power of social technology to empower and persuade won’t be ignored by today’s candidates, and we’ll likely see the emergence of at least one great company out of the 2012 election.

If the rest of this year is anything like the last one, we’re in for a wild ride of fragmentation, consolidation and innovation.

Dinesh Moorjani is the founder and CEO of Hatch Labs, a mobile start-up incubator creating new platforms and applications to improve mobility for the wireless generation.

As of today, Pulse users can subscribe to a curated feed of trending election news, or follow dedicated feeds around specific candidates or political commentators. (So I suppose you don’t really have to leave the comfortable confines of the filter bubble, if you don’t want to.)

Pulse is available for iPad, iPhone, Android and Windows Phone. It adds 1.5 million to two million new users per month, according to CEO Akshay Kothari. He said those users read more than five million stories per day. Kothari declined to comment on plans to add a desktop version.

Via Kothari, here are the new Pulse news sources: Fox News, the New Republic, the Los Angeles Times, Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos and Reason Magazine; plus dedicated political news from previous sources the Daily Beast, the Atlantic, the Atlantic Wire, Slate, Al Jazeera, the New Yorker, USA Today and the Huffington Post.

Included presidential candidates are Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum.

And included political commentators are Rachel Maddow, Hendrik Hertzberg, Erick Erickson, John Cassidy, David Brody, Jared Bernstein and David Horsey.

The first was last year in Hillsboro, Oregon, and during the visit, Intel CEO Paul Otellini announced that the new chip plant, or “fab” as they’re usually called, would be built in Arizona.

The main reason that Obama loves Intel is that it’s an example of the kind of manufacturing work that he’d like to see more of in America. As such, the sight of Intel spending $5 billion to build a new plant and adding 4,000 jobs is the sort of thing that any president would like to stand close to, especially at the onset of what looks to be a tough re-election campaign. It’s also one of those rare companies that’s riding high despite an uncertain global economy.

One thing Obama certainly didn’t mention was that Intel added plants in Israel and China in the last year as well. He’s also in no hurry to remind the audience that the chips that Intel makes will be shipped to China and inserted into computers and servers, many of which will be shipped into the United States.

We also learned this week from the New York Times, Obama seemed vaguely baffled by the notion that Apple’s iPhone is manufactured in China, and in a meeting in Silicon Valley last year asked Apple CEO Steve Jobs why they couldn’t be made in the U.S. Jobs’s answer, which is correct: Those jobs aren’t coming back. David Ricardo’s law of Comparative Advantage strikes again.

Anyway, the only video of the full speech that I’ve found came from the local TV station, ABC15, and thankfully they have made it embeddable.

In his remarks, the president is impressed both with the grand scale of things involved in building chips — he remembers seeing an electron microscope at Intel’s plant in Oregon that was powerful enough to display atoms, which is certainly impressive. In Chandler he’s impressed with what he says is the world’s largest land-based crane, which is being used in the construction effort. Enjoy the speech.

(Image is a screen grab from earlier in the video.)

But some social media analysis of politics is going beyond that. A partnership between Facebook and Politico announced today is one of the more far-reaching efforts. It will consist of sentiment analysis reports and voting-age user surveys, accompanied by stories by Politico reporters.

Most notably, the Facebook-Politico data set will include Facebook users’ private status messages and comments. While that may alarm some people, Facebook and Politico say the entire process is automated and no Facebook employees read the posts.

Rather, every post and comment — both public and private — by a U.S. user that mentions a presidential candidate’s name will be fed through a sentiment analysis tool that spits out anonymized measures of the general U.S. Facebook population.

This is similar to the way Google offers reports on search trends based on its users’ aggregate search activities.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Visible Measures says it has attracted more than 1 million views since last night. I can tell you with almost clinical precision that his debate gaffe occurred around 10:18 pm Eastern time, because it was all over Twitter as soon as it left — or didn’t leave — his mouth.

Still, it’s not Perry’s biggest Web video hit (yet). Visible Measures reminds us that his first big campaign ad racked up more than 2 million views earlier this fall.

Meanwhile, for ad/tech/biz types: Note that the moment occurred on CNN’s broadcast, but YouTube attributes the bulk of the views to Huffington Post co-founder Jonah Peretti’s BuzzFeed, which got the clip up with alacrity. [Ugh. As Ethan Mandel notes, this was actually CNBC's broadcast -- easy enough to spot had I been paying attention -- and now CNBC has removed this particular version. Still easy enough to find on YouTube, though.]