Just about one week left until the contested Chittenden Democrat primary, and so it’s crunch time. Votes must be gotten out, and not just in the three-dimensional world: if the netroots are to be respected in the political world, then the netroots also have to prove their muscle in getting out the vote. Which brings us to the week’s project: Pulsing The System. AKA Netting Out The Vote.

By pulsing the system, we mean every supporter of this State Senate campaign (and every supporter of every issue we support, from GMO labeling to single-payer to shuttering Vermont Yankee) reaching out to their own individual electronic network with a simple message: I plan to vote for Baruth, and hope you will too.

That’s it: a message just that brief if you like, but posted to your Facebook and Twitter pages, and then sent as a broadcast email to your address book. If you can throw in an extra 3 minutes, posting it to your Front Porch Forum list helps a lot.

But altogether that might take — might, if you really type slowly and deliberately — about 10 minutes. That 10 minutes, though, reaches maybe 1000 people. And if everyone who supports this campaign reaches their universe, we’re golden.

Think of it this way. Technology is woven into your life; you spend hours interfacing with it, and that’s a scary thing if some of that time isn’t spent accomplishing something real, tangible and of benefit to others. Politics is one way to do that, and here in Vermont we’re engaged in some truly exciting political developments.

A first-in-the-nation ban on fracking. The country’s first true single-payer healthcare system.

Reaching out to your network with a quick endorsement is, very literally speaking, the least any of us can do. And you know we here at VDB will appreciate it until our dying day.

Thanks in advance.