I want to take a moment an plug a pretty cool site that I've been fooling around with lately, LocalVoter. It's a one-stop shop for what you need to know about elections and elected offices - who your incumbents are, who's running for what, links to city and county resources such as polling places and election results, and so on. Not all of Texas is covered just yet - right now, it has info on the Houston, Austin, Dallas, and Southeast Texas areas - but all of it should be by the time November rolls around.

One other useful thing LocalVoter has is resources for candidates, in which people who search for their ballot information can be pointed to a campaign webpage or a request for a yard sign. Those of you out there who do actual work with candidates might want to check that out.

I had the opportunity to meet and talk to Chris Ladd, the man behind LocalVoter, earlier this week, and I came away impressed with the work he's done here. He's started to get a bit of notice for himself and the site (see here, here, and here for his media mentions) and I think he's going to get a fair bit of traffic this election season. Early voting for primaries is going on through the end of next week, so now's as good a time as any to check out LocalVoter and see what it can do for you.