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Monitoring the U.S. Elections Online?
shahman wonders: "I'll be on the road all day this election day, so the only access I'll have is through my PDA/Phone. I was wondering if any Slashdot readers know of WAP-enabled services or low-bandwidth sites that are providing (semi) real-time election coverage?" Nobbin has a similar, but less bandwidth-restrictive question: "I was wondering where I could find live results for the coming U.S. election, online. I live in Australia so I can't get them through watching CNN and so forth. I'm looking for something similar to the Austalian Electoral Commission's virtual tally room. So far, Google hasn't turned up much."
CNN has a tally room, which I think is what Nobbin is getting at.
Mencken had it right. So glad that's old news.
Wikipedia's article U.S. presidential election, 2004 answers the higher bandwidth question quite thoroughly - with results (updated frequently) and links to a host of sites that will report the results as they come in. Don't expect much before 23:00 GMT since that's when the first of the polls close.
I hate call waitin`~+~~~
NO CARRIER
http://www.pollstats.com
air america radio will have special coverage and with their 30-something stations and the live stream, you should be able to get some good out of them.
also, http://www.electoral-vote.com/ is going to have ongoing coverage all night also.
of course all the usual suspects like cnn and the other general papers and new sources should have pretty up to date info as well.
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
I suggest mobile.cnn.com, if you can get it on your phone. On my phone (AT&T wireless), it has a bunch of pages like "Top Stories", "Full Results", "The Candidates", and "What's at Stake"
Since I'll be volunteering up until the polls close, I suppose I'll be using it a lot...
(after that, it's fox news all the way...I like my news the way I wanna hear it!)
http://indymedia.us/en/2004/11/1811.shtmlh p
http://www.michaelmoore.com/electionwatch/index.p
... but the League of Women Voters have a very good site called SmartVoter.org which gives you analysis on each measure/prop. They have some VERY limited information on the candidates, but they do link to more info. The info is broken all the way down to your local ballot.
"1984" was ment to be a warning, not a guidebook. You hear that Kim Jong-il!? BushCo?!
Couldn't you just listen to the radio?
Matt Drudge said he will run exit-polilng data through the day. He did during the 2002 election. The major networks agreed to stop doing this after the 2000 problems.
You might be able to find something on your county board of elections web site or your secretary of state web site. (Newton doesn't have much on the web, except this: "Election results from the November 2, 2004, general election in Newton County will be projected in the comissioners' board room in the historic courthouse beginning at approximately 9:00 P.M. on November 2, 2004." But the web site does show a pet of the week, a goat.)
I hate call waitin`~+~~~
NO CARRIER
This is the United States.
We have 50 separate state elections.
Look into it.
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/pre sident/
The networks never broadcasted exit polling data before the polls in any given area were closed... that started well before the 2000 debacle.
...I would be quite comfortable hazzarding a guess that Yahoo will have real time coverage (including Yahoo! Mobile which should work fine on any PDA/Phone). Given the very impressive real time World Series coverage they had, surely they'll do at least as much during the election. Here's a link that should prove valuable:
o litics/elections/presidential_elections/2004_presi dential_election/
http://dir.yahoo.com/government/u_s__government/p
Hope this helps.
Don't run the site, but ran across this tonight (via Wizbang). Its being run by a blogger, so how quickly things get updated I have no idea, but it looks pretty promising.
http://electoral-vote.com/ is planning on providing semi-real time coverage online. The side is almost completely text (on the main page anyways) and only has the one image of the electoral vote prediction (which I imagine will be zeroed tomorrow morning). If the server goes down there are 5 mirrors (httpL://www.electoral-vote2.com/, ...., http://www.electoral-vote6.com/)
Try electoral-vote.com. The maintainer does a great job following current polls state-by-state with electoral vote totals and has promised to keep the site current tomorrow as results come in. Sometimes the site has been flaky under heavy loads, in which case you should try electoral-vote3.com, electoral-vote4.com as well.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
http://www.electoral-vote.com/
Matt Drudge said he will run exit-polilng data through the day. He did during the 2002 election. The major networks agreed to stop doing this after the 2000 problems.
Matt Drudge is not running any exit polling. Matt Drudge is one guy; he doesn't have the power to do anything at all himself, and he has no organization. He's one guy (actually with another guy who helps him out) with a web site. That's it.
Drudge relies on polling data that he "obtains" from various sources, some of whom he names, some of whom he doesn't. Sometimes his exit polling data bears a resemblance to reality; usually, it's not even close. He had Bush up in Florida by something like 24 points in 2000 originally, and we all know how that turned out. In any case, it's not as if you can go to his site and expect to get nationwide exit polling - you'll see results for two counties in Ohio, three in Florida, one in Nebraska... that kind of thing. And he'll pick and choose to post only the polls he wants to post, either because he wants to turn out more pro-Bush voters in those areas or because he wants to show how far ahead Bush is and make the outcome seem inevitable. Some people who seem to think he's an unbiased source of news apparently don't realize he does these things, but he does. And he doesn't see anything wrong with it; he thinks he's just being an "editor".
There is no such thing as a reliable source of exit polling data in this country, and IMO there shouldn't be. There was a small controversy about this after the last election - a few people (like Drudge) questioning why they shouldn't post exit poll data in advance - but these people are mostly idiots who don't understand how an election actually works (again, like Drudge).
So you will not be able to get a "live tally" of the vote from overseas or anywhere else, because no such thing exists. The vote tallies are counted after the polls close, and are only then reported by each polling district. So you will not see any official numbers at all until the first polls close on the east coast - not sure exactly when that is, but probably around 7 PM EST.
If you do find anything on the net that claims to have election results or polling data prior to the polls closing, don't believe the results. Anyone can make up numbers and guys like Drudge are only too eager to post them without any verification at all (I half-believe he makes up some of his un-sourced numbers himself). If, at the end of the night, they don't match the official totals, they'll just say "oh well, samples don't always match the totals, etc. etc." when they could have just as easily just been pulling those numbers out of their asses.
People don't always answer truthfully in exit polls anyway. Our votes are supposed to be private and honestly, if somebody I didn't know asked me who I voted for outside a polling place, I probably would lie. It's none of their business who I voted for and how do I know who they say they are anyway? They could be working for the guy I voted against. They could be a group of drunken supporters of the other guy pretending to be pollsters and out to beat up people who voted for my candidate. I'd probably say I wrote somebody in.
Point is, exit polls are not reliable - they're not reliable even if they're real exit polls, and half of what you see on the net is made up anyway. This is why the major nets agreed not to rely on them so heavily anymore. Wait for the official results, which will come after the polls close.
except for the 20 or so AM stations that i can pick up here in sydney.
Well, that's obviously not true. In fact, there will even be US election coverage on the AM band.
NewsRadio are promising coverage starting about 10am.
Fox News is brain-dead. I'm sure most Australians would agree.
If you have access to Fox (which means you have cable TV), you would also have access to BBC, CNN and CNBC.
OLPC Australia
The DCCC* is running a site called RESULTRON that will send out results for the presidential and congressional races by SMS and RSS.
*Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee
When violence rules the world outside / And the headlines make me want to cry / It's not the time to just keep quiet
This is the follow-up report explaining how it was real-time poll monitoring that was completely responsible for the confusion after the last election. They (CNN and maybe the others) seem to have decided to be responsible (in the Jon Stewart sense) and won't be fighting so haphazardly for meaningless tidbits of data which will, on the whole, only confuse matters while at the same time disgusting viewers.
Besides, realtime monitoring will only skew the results of the election more towards an ugly tie. Once one side sees the other side winning all sorts of people who didn't care to vote originally will suddenly pop out of the woodwork. If the people didn't want to vote without having to be prodded they really shouldn't be voting. This is a representative democracy and I'd like to think that our government represents only the people who *really* care.
Also, those of you not in swing states and who are rooting for the losing side in your state should *really* consider your third parties. Otherwise, you're throwing your vote away. Make it count.
Direct away from face when opening.
vote early, then spend the rest of the day stabbing myself periodically with an icepick. With any luck, I'll have bled out by the time the results are in.
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
well, the ABC has at least 2 news stations, local radio, a classical station and some others... one of which, newsradio, will for a couple of hours a day have broadcasts of PBN (i think - its a US public news radio stations) Duetche-Welle (sp), BBC, theres a heap of other news stations, several of which run bbc world service for most of the day, your local ethnic stations in x language, some classical stations, some dodgy 40-50's easy listening stations, talkback - you name it. possibly more variety than what you get on FM.
Seriously folks, in battleground states like Florida and Ohio, the results might depend on:
* provisional ballots cast due to challenges on election day.
* absentee ballots trickling in over the rest of the month.
this is a good one click on "US 2004 Pres Election Flag" banner
Otherwise, you use Google's WAP/cHTML interface to screenscrape your favorite news site and turn it into something readable on your phone. Just bookmark that and you're ready to go. Also on the google front, you could sign up for news alerts and have those mailed to your phone.
Finally, you might try to look at a gambling website like http://www.tradesports.com and just bookmark the page of the 'price' of the presidency. The the closer to $1 the price reaches, the more likely that guy will win.
Michigan Indymedia does here (all fields but phone number & carrier are optional)
There's an RSS feed at http://www.electoral-vote.com/. They say they are going to try to be real-time on Tuesday and the RSS feed is low bandwidth.
I share your frustration, but we did have our chance last month, and blew it. :(
http://www.foxnews.com/
There is an applet called "Track Your Races -- Election Tracker" toward the bottom of the main display segement - it allows you to monitor the Presidential election and up to 10 other state/congression races and/or ballot issues, it is live updated, and based on returns, not exit polls.
Set aside your preconceptions about Fox, the app is useful for what you say you want, and numbers are numbers.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
The DCCC is sending out SMS alerts throughout the day tomorrow. You can sign up here: http://www.democraticaction.org/results/index.html
caritj.org
Two sites for you.
www.issues2000.org
www.factcheck.org
Enjoy.
Looking for an American based site for objective coverage may not be that enlightening.
To get a global perspective of the impact of the election result and overall good quality coverage, keep an eye on http://news.bbc.co.uk/. I know that in the UK there will be a "Through The Night" results program broadcast, and in the past these "News Specials" have been simultaneously broadcast via Real Player on the BBC site. No guarantees, but they do tend to do this with big news stories.
Wikipedia also has a page monitoring the progress of the 2004 US presidential election.
Note for those who left their humor detectors at home like the AC: The parent refers to a long thread yesterday, where a poster claimed that Americans would tend to do exactly the opposite of whatever the Europeans wanted in the election.
Not true at all. Absentee ballots are always counted -- or do you think that only one office is on the ballot in your district today?