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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."
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.
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!)
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.
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?!
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.
Because the elections are a spectator sport just like the World Series.
It's just not the same without knowing in real time with commentary and slow motion replays.
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.
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.
I don't think the reporters being honest matters when the ballot counters aren't.
"What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos"
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.
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.
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/
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.