Monitoring the U.S. Elections Online? 535
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."
try CNN (Score:5, Informative)
Wikipedia has results & an index (Score:5, Informative)
Try (Score:3, Informative)
a few ideas (Score:5, Informative)
also, http://www.electoral-vote.com/ [electoral-vote.com] is going to have ongoing coverage all night also.
of course all the usual suspects like cnn [cnn.com] and the other general papers and new sources should have pretty up to date info as well.
CNN to Go (Score:5, Informative)
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!)
Re:try CNN (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/resul
The other link needs registration.
Indymedia (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.michaelmoore.com/electionwatch/index.p
Not EXACTLY what you're looking for... (Score:5, Informative)
i know this is simple, but.. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Nothing to see here. Move along... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Does this exist? (Score:3, Informative)
There is no US election (Score:1, Informative)
We have 50 separate state elections.
Look into it.
clickizzle (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nothing to see here. Move along... (Score:3, Informative)
While I can't say definitively... (Score:3, Informative)
http://dir.yahoo.com/government/u_s__government/p
Hope this helps.
Megapundit.com (Score:3, Informative)
Electoral-vote.com (Score:2, Informative)
www.electoral-vote.com (Score:3, Informative)
this is good for (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.electoral-vote.com/ [electoral-vote.com]
Re:Nothing to see here. Move along... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:There's this tech called Amplitude Modulation.. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:try CNN (Score:1, Informative)
Re:There's this tech called Amplitude Modulation.. (Score:2, Informative)
Well, that's obviously not true. In fact, there will even be US election coverage on the AM band.
NewsRadio [abc.net.au] are promising coverage starting about 10am.
Re:Not EXACTLY what you're looking for... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Australia has the Fox News Channel! (Score:2, Informative)
If you have access to Fox (which means you have cable TV), you would also have access to BBC, CNN and CNBC.
Re:try CNN (Score:2, Informative)
YRO [cox.net]
Resultron! (Score:4, Informative)
*Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee
Re:Why? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Me, I'm gonna (Score:1, Informative)
Re:There's this tech called Amplitude Modulation.. (Score:2, Informative)
Official results won't be in for days... (Score:5, Informative)
* provisional ballots cast due to challenges on election day.
* absentee ballots trickling in over the rest of the month.
Monitoring the US Election (Score:2, Informative)
Phones: BBC...or Google ...or a gambling site (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:What about text (Score:3, Informative)
TRY electoral-vote.com (RSS Feed) (Score:1, Informative)
Re:I live in Australia too... (Score:4, Informative)
Online live updated applet (Score:4, Informative)
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.
SMS (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Does this exist? (Score:2, Informative)
www.issues2000.org
www.factcheck.org
Enjoy.
Keep an eye on BBC News... (Score:2, Informative)
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/ [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.
Obligatory Wikipedia link (Score:2, Informative)
Re:try CNN (Score:4, Informative)
Re:As a European I support Bush and his ideology (Score:2, Informative)
Note for those who left their humor detectors at home like the AC: The parent refers to a long thread yesterday [slashdot.org], where a poster claimed that Americans would tend to do exactly the opposite of whatever the Europeans wanted in the election.
Re:Absentee Ballots (Score:2, Informative)