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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
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.
Don't worry, Diebold has already decided who won, they'll let you know.
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!)
US election data doesn't compress into simple numbers very easily. I'd recommend those traveling use either a car-mounted or handheld radio... using the radio in AM mode would be highly recommended in most areas because news format stations are typically found there, although there are a few FM news/talk stations in existance.
First off. Expect to know nothing useful until polls close. It's US media tradition not to release exit poll data or make winner projections until the polls in any given state are closed under the theory that early victory news might discurage turnout and affect the outcome. Therefore, don't bother looking for results during the daytime. Nobody's going to be projecting a winner until well into primetime. The only major site that might break this tradition is The Drudge Report, but its unknown what kind of info Drudge will get.
Then there's the complexity of the Electoral College system. Really, there isn't one election happening tomorrow, there's fifty state elections plus one more for D.C. over which slate of electors to send forward. Having a running total of the national popular vote is not useful data because that's data that doesn't lead to anything.
Further complexing things is that there's also hundreds of Congressional races tomorrow because every seat in the House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate come up for re-election as they do every two years. The control of the majority of both of those bodies will be in play tomorrow as well. And let's not forget that many states have ballot question issues and local offices in play as well.
So... when you add it all up there's over 500 seperate races of national importance to consider tomorrow. No small text screen can do it justice... use radio and TV and let them explain it one by one. Sit back, and relax... the pundits will be on all night because there's going to be a lot for them to talk about.
This same technique of delayed gratification has served me well for lots of things.
The resultes don't change by knowing them sooner.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Why does real time monitoring matter, I mean look at the last presidential election. I think all this polling and up to the second exit polls are only adding to the problem. In the grand scheme(sp?) does it affect you if you know today or three days from now who the president will be. Look at the days before internet before tv, before radio, before wire service when information took days to get across country. The world still worked. Life will go on. Besides I doubt there will be a conclusive answer for weeks.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
I personally wish I could just crawl into a cave and leaving a wake-up call for inaguration day. I can't IMAGINE wanting to keep up with the minute-by-minute details of what'll doubtless be only the beginning of a weeks-long debacle. Put it another way - do you really need to go out of your way to get "information" of questionable relevance a few seconds before you would anyway? It's the Presidential election, you'd have to be pretty careful NOT to find out about anything really significant.
Relax. Get a book-on-tape of something you've always wanted to read for your journey. Use the time wisely instead of suckling at the mass-media tit because they've told you that you MUST be INFORMED every MINUTE of the DAY, by US!
Perfectly Normal Industries
... 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?!
For real-time monitoring of the election results, read the morning paper every day. Repeat until mid-December.
Find free books.
More coming up... after the break.
The friendliest digital photography forums on the net!
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/pre sident/
> I live in Australia so I can't get them through watching CNN and so forth
The way I see it, you're about 9 hours ahead of us (?) so why don't YOU tell US the outcome???
http://www.electoral-vote.com/
I live in Australia too, and I gotta tell ya, it is infinitely frustrating. This election directly affects all of us here, and everyone in the other fifty (or however many it is) states has the constitutional right to vote, why not us? I suppose Hawaii went through the same thing at one stage, being separated from the mainland just like us.
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
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.
Besides, the Supreme Court won't get to vote for 3 or 4 weeks anyway.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
For me all I have to do is watch the value of one of my stocks. Specifically I just have to watch the value of my StemCells, Inc (Nasdaq: STEM) stock. I own 3000 shares of it. If Kerry is doing well then so will my stock. If Kerry isn't doing so well then my stock value will probably go down. Personally I am predicting a record payday for me tomorrow. So are many others apparently. Stay tuned...
Personally, I think it is because the lokal election stations are so badly run, the states fear what might happen if someone saw and documented it.
It's the need for insta-polls and immediate results and such on the part of the voting populace that, in part, caused the mess of the 2000 election. Everyone wanted to know NOW who won each state, so the networks call elections the instant the polls close. Of course, they forgot that some of Floria's polls close later. Did that affect the turnout in those areas? Maybe. But it also meant that suddenly everyone ASSUMED Gore carried Florida.
Then when Fox News decided to call Florida for Bush instead, just to be biased about it, everyone suddenly reversed it and called the election for Bush, and with it the national results. So everyone ASSUMED that Bush was President-Elect.
Then the recount mess began, and it APPEARED that Gore had lost but was whining about it. In fact, THE ELECTION WAS NOT OFFICIALLY CERTIFIED YET. But because people wanted a reality TV show instead of real news, and the networks of course gave it to them, public perception was screwed to hell. That's what caused the mess in 2000, more than anything else.
You'll find out who won tomorrow morning. Or more likely, you'll find out which states are being contested due to election fraud tomorrow morning. Don't encourage the 3 ring circus.
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
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.
The user is "admin" and the password is "password". Just set the winner by state and percentage. There are a few bugs that make things unpredictable, however. Now that you know, I'm going to have to kill you.
I only wish that I was joking. Try this on for size:
The central servers are installed on unpatched, open Windows computers and use RAS (Remote Access Server) to connect to the voting machines through telephone lines. Since RAS is not adequately protected, anyone in the world, even terrorists, who can figure out the server's phone number can change vote totals without being detected by observers. The passwords in many locations are easily guessed, and the access phone numbers can be learned through social engineering or war dialing.
Unpatched Winblows, RAS, modems? Un-#######-believable!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
> i love how the auto-linking of a URL requires user specification, and so isn't automatic at all.
:-)
I love how somone just got modded +5 informative for making a link clickable.
Most all vote returns used to be processed with the night / next day after the Presidential election.
... but it seems various parts of American (U.S.) society are going backwords; how is it that many "third world" countries, some with populations rivaling that of the U.S., can conduct an election on ONE day (as opposed to the 30 days some Americans have; totally unnecessary - whatever happen to voting being a civic duty in which one dedicated part of their day to perform, but I digress) and have most, if not all, votes counted within a day or two. For example, the recent election in Afganistan (with a population of about 28 million) didn't take weeks to count despite how primative the country is - how did they do it so fast? Well, the same way many other countries do ... simple ballots, and a lot of people counting (or machines for scan countable ballots) - simple, fast, and verifiable.
... yep, a whole whopping night ... and they thought that was slow. In 2004, it will likely take much, much longer to determine who the President is than it did in 1948 or maybe even longer than in 1888!
Now it takes weeks? Welcome to the 19th century - though I think by the tail end of that century (late 1800s), votes were counted relatively quickly compared to how long votes in 2004 will likely take to count.
Digressing a bit here
Voting in the U.S. has degenerated into something that even a decade or so ago was unimaginable to most folks - vote monitors from other countries watching our elections, allowing people to vote over many weeks instead of one day, numerous flawed/corrupt voting systems, and vote counting that take weeks, and possibly longer...
This is progress? And to think many older people still speak of the Dewey / Truman election and how long it took to get results
Ron Bennett
Uhh...Fox News is owned by an Aussie, Rupert Murdoch. So don't generalize and label Americans as stupid just as I'm not generalizing and labelling all Australians as conservative propagandists.
Ugh, your site gives me a headache. I'm sorry, I really wanted to read the article, but the ugly font, white text on black, and dark blue links on top of black that highlight with puke flourescent green... I just couldnt handle it after about 30 seconds :(
:P
Its too bad because I was interested in what you had to say
Joseph?
As a European, I'm thoroughly ashamed how many would vote for Kerry when clearly Bush is your only way to go. He has great vision, speech and plans for the future. What other candidate has great plans for going to mars? The US patriotism must never be allowed to die, because without it, where would the world be?
Kerry is just a multibillionaire. He's too intelligent. He speaks too coherently, consider the issues in detail, thus thinks TOO much (flip, flop). How can you trust Kerry with anything? Better to vote Independent than to vote Kerry.
As a European, it is incomprehensible to me that anybody could vote for somebody like Kerry. Bush is clearly the one you must vote for. So I urge every patriot US consumer to vote for Bush. You have to! Somebody must be left to save your Country!? I am seriously concerned about you.
You have to vote for Bush, as a European I demand it. Kerry can't be allowed to win any election, neither here or in the US.
I say Bush is your only choice. Either you're with me on this, or you're against me. There's no middle ground for you.
Either you have to vote for Bush, or you have to vote Independent. It's better for you to vote independent or don't vote at all, than to vote on Kerry, so you won't steal any votes from Bush. Kerry is absolutely a no-no for you. I know what's best for you, because God speaks through me.
For more information, here is the grand future plans for the US. Notice the names at the bottom, do you find Kerry there? NO. He's a wuss. He doesn't value our fundamental principles.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Actually there's this assumption that the US news tends to be a lot worse than the rest of the world's; I mean -- it's bad, but it's mostly just notable because it's so exported.
I mean -- Fox News, as bad as it is -- is still quite a step up from Germany's most popular newspaper, Bild Zeitung ("Picture Times"), or how about England's most read paper, The Sun ?
It's easy to look at Fox from inside the US and think, "Wow, this is terrible..." and it is, but that's not a unique phenomenon to the US and just as the UK tends to export The Guardian, the BBC, the Economist -- or Germany the Frankfurter Algemeine, Speigel or Die Zeit the US tends to export CNN, Newsweek, the New York Times, the New Yorker and so on. That's not to say that any of those are perfect, but they're markedly better.
In short, if you are making an informed decision on the ballot, by all means vote away. If not, please leave democracy in the hands of those who are competent to vote. Thank you.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
People have been getting slammed recently for mentioning there are very valid reasons not to vote. Rights don't exist in a vacuum. The right to bear arms is supposed to come with the responsibility to take up those arms to defend this country against attack. The right of free speach adds the responsibility to defend the right to speak words that offend you. Freedom of religion makes us responsible to defend all against persecution as well as using our religion to strengthen and comfort the poor, weak, and downtrodden. The right to vote comes with the responsibility to educate yourselves. Quite frankly some people ignore this responsibility to the point they really should forfeit their right to vote.
If you blindly believe everything EITHER candidate says, stay home today.
If you think CNN is the word from on high and Fox is the devil, or the other way around, please stay home.
If you believe either candidate is A) planning on using the draft or B) unwilling to use the draft if they have to, stay home today.
If you think Kerry plans on only taxing the rich, or Bush plans on only taxing the poor, stay home today.
If you believe Kerry that the top 20% paying 67% of the governments tax revenue constitutes "the middle class paying the highest burden", please stay home today.
If you believe Bush that Kerry voting against tax breaks is the same as Kerry voting for raising taxes, please stay home today.
If you think Bush is right in making a political issue of a religious commitment to marriage, for no other reason than it's wrong for gays to get married, please stay home today.
If you think you should vote for Kerry because Edwards is young and Cheney is old, please stay home today.
If you think you should vote democrat because they somehow care about your ethnic group without any specific plans on what they will do to help you personally, please stay home today.
If you think you should vote republican because they somehow care about your ethnic group without any specific plans on what they will do to help you personally, please stay home today.
If you think the "major tax break" of not having to pay FICA on overseas workers is the reason that companies save millions of dollars a year paying Achmed 12k a year over paying John 60k a year, please stay home today.
Finally, if you think T. H. Kerry is an attractive women, please gouge your eyes out.
Never confuse volume with power.