Rocking the vote one email at a time

• Voters in North Carolina elected to pass a constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriage, and opponents are already organizing a Change.org petition to repeal it.

More ad dollars online

• The Obama campaign and other Democratic groups have spent $21 million on web ads so far since 2011, twice as much as all the Republican presidential primary campaigns and the RNC combined, ClickZ reported.

  The disparity is especially significant because it suggests President Barack Obama's campaign team has dropped millions online to book ad space that will be used months from now in the hopes of preventing Mitt Romney and his Republican backers from getting the ad space - which could be limited in important battleground states targeting key voter groups ... The Obama camp spent the bulk of that, just under $19 million, through March ... Now, in addition to merely asking people to "join" the campaign or help by donating money, Obama for America (OFA) has been presenting messages aimed at convincing voters that the economy and job growth are improving - and more recently contrasting Obama with likely Republican nominee Mitt Romney. In other words, while Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and the rest of the GOP flock were embroiled in primary infighting, the Obama camp took advantage by building up a fresh database of volunteers and donors. Some of the ads running online this year have gone a step further by incorporating issue-oriented messaging intended to reenergize the Democratic base and attract independents.

• The New York Times profiles Jim Margolis, who heads advertising efforts for the Obama campaign.

• Nancy Scola noted that the Obama campaign is offering special access to its tech staff to potential fundraisers.

• Wikipedia users decided to delete a page that drew connections between the Obama campaign slogan "Forward" and leftist publications of the same name.

Around the web

• Adweek looks at the success so far of Politico Live, a live-streaming online video service of the site, which has also recently been simulcasting on C-SPAN.

• Twitter filed a motion in New York state court asking that a court order requiring it to turn over information about one if its users, an Occupy Wall Street protester, be overturned.

• An L.A. Times developer is seeking funding on Kickstarter for a project that saves the images of 70 news sites every hour. On Hacker News, a former New York Times developer shared the URL code for accessing old daily snapshots of the NYT homepage up to 2001.

• An Illinois court has barred the enforcement of a law that made it illegal for people to audio record police officers in public without their consent. Chicago officials had previously said they would not enforce the law during the expected protests at the upcoming NATO summit in Chicago, the Chicago Tribune reported.

• The U.S. confirmed that it is investigating a cyber-attack allegedly targeting gas pipelines.

• Reuters reported on the increased role of technology in Western terror investigations:

  Key to Western success against terror groups, experts say, is the much greater computing power and more sophisticated analytical tools available to intelligence services -- coupled with the much greater volume of data and clues that militants themselves often leave behind them in the information age. "Technology has played a major role here, particularly in the arena of modern communications," says [a former MI6 official]. "The 'electronic exhaust' left by terrorists when they communicate has made them easier to track and sophisticated relational software has made it much easier to identify connections between people who don't want to appear connected."

• Rupert Murdoch tried to spark a debate about Ron Paul on Twitter.

• Singer Jason Paige, the vocalist on the original Pokemon theme song, has remixed the theme in a video supporting Ron Paul.

• Did Mark Zuckerberg steal the idea for Facebook ... from Abraham Lincoln? CNET responds not so much.

• The government is now officially suggesting that citizens draft a "social media will" as part of its personal finance recommendations, the Daily News reported.

• Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) says colleges and universities should post their tax information online.

• Matt Turck of Bloomberg Ventures writes about why New York City is becoming a hub for data startups.

• A writer for The Awl spoke with ex-Wikileaks spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg about how his planned Wikileaks successor, OpenLeaks, will differ from the now more infamous site. OpenLeaks has been in the nearing launch for well over a year now.

• Nevada has approved Google's plans to test self-driving vehicles.

• Hank the Cat, a feline running for Senate in Virginia, has raised $6,000 for animal rescue organizations.

• The New York Times noted that in the negotiations over Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, "the use of technology — posts on Twitter, a dramatic call to a Congressional hearing — boxed in the Chinese but also left Americans scrambling."

• A Chinese blogger is seeking compensation for the one-year labor sentence he received for posting a poem online that mocked the now-disgraced official Bo Xilai. Nieman Lab spoke with a designer who has worked with Chinese activist Ai Weiwei about how memes are often the only form of protest in China.

• PaidContent suggests that Francois Hollande's government could walk back the French Hadopi system for targeting illegal downloaders of copyrighted content, and may move to focusing more on infringing websites.

• Jerome Cukier, a data visualization consultant from Paris, examined what, if any, role, data visualization had in the French election, and also notes the recent launch of the country's open data portal.

• The deputy general secretary of the German conservative CSU party, sister party of Chancellor Merkel's CDU, writes in a press release, as chair of her party's working group for netpolicy, that the fact that Google's new Hangout on Air service is available in several countries but not Germany, due to the country's broadcasting agreements, is an example of how many laws and regulations are out of touch with modern times.

• Britain's Queen's Speech today, a traditional venue for announcing new government policies, is expected to include proposals related to televising portions of court proceedings, but also controversial Internet surveillance plans.

• British cabinet ministers vetoed the release of a risk assessment about the overhaul of the National Healthcare System.

• The Netherlands has adopted net neutrality legislation.

• U.S. and Chinese defense officials say they have agreed to cooperate on cyber-issues, particularly to avoid any future escalation into a crisis.

• The Argentine government is being accused of promoting its policies with fake Twitter accounts.

• The BBC looks at the upcoming launch of an Islamic social network.