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Where to get Election Day results

This is the first year that you can realistically watch the election entirely online. Read on for our recommendations of what sites to visit on Election Day.

Declan McCullagh Former Senior Writer
Declan McCullagh is the chief political correspondent for CNET. You can e-mail him or follow him on Twitter as declanm. Declan previously was a reporter for Time and the Washington bureau chief for Wired and wrote the Taking Liberties section and Other People's Money column for CBS News' Web site.
Declan McCullagh
4 min read

What feels like the longest and most tiring election in American history, and certainly ranks as the most expensive by far, is not quite over.

If you're like many of us here at CNET News, you'll be watching the results stream in both on television and on the Internet. To help you out, we've compiled the following list of places to stop for results, news, and opinion on Election Day:

• Google's 2008 Election Map is one of a series of mashups and provides what will be real-time results, unfettered by opinion or commentary. Visitors can look at the big picture or search states for county-by-county results, or totals for Senate or House of Representatives races.

• The Associated Press has been covering presidential elections since 1846, and is putting its expertise to good use through a continuous video stream starting at 4 p.m. PT. This is a first for the venerable news organization, and will feature AP writers and editors discussing the returns, as well as live reports from the presidential campaign headquarters.

• Our sister site CBS News has created a Campaign '08 home page with an analysis by Jeff Greenfield about what states are likely to be the earliest reliable indicators of a victory by John McCain or Barack Obama. Also see the CBS News widgets embedded at the top and the bottom of this page, our 2008 Technology Voter Guide, and our 2008 election roundup.

• If you want to use your cell phone, check out CBS Mobile News, which will tell you when CBS News calls a winner; there's also live streaming coverage on Mobile TV (MediaFlo) and VCast (Verizon). There's also CNN's mobile election center, which features poll results, video, and breaking news alerts. The New York Times will be sending out text alerts with the outcomes for the presidential, house, senate, and governors' races. iPhone users can download Slate's new Poll Tracker '08 application, which uses data from Pollster.com to provide polling updates from every state and charts with voting patterns from previous elections.

• For local results, try CNN's Your Races, which lets you monitor the outcome of local ballot measures. The tool can track up to 35 races at a time from any combination of states. Local Web sites, like the California secretary of state's MyVote site, should also provide information for local results. Once California polls close, MyVote will have county-by-county results for statewide offices, assembly races, and ballot measures.

• Concerns with electronic voting machines have hardly disappeared this election, and sites are offering ways to report problems. The technology whizzes at the Electronic Frontier Foundation created the ourvotelive.org Web site, which offers RSS feeds, raw text, and an embeddable widget to track e-voting and other voting problems. (The downside is that noise may drown out signal. Some reports seem to be mere voter confusion, and there's no obvious way to verify the validity of others.)


• YouTube and PBS are offering a "Video Your Vote" channel and encouraging voters to upload clips that are related to their voting experiences on November 4. They can be sorted by specific categories, including early voting, polling place problems, and voter intimidation. One West Virginia voter claimed that a touchscreen voting machine's sensitivity made it difficult to vote for Democrats.

• No Election Day list would be complete without blogs to follow. There are Andrew Sullivan, Daily Kos, Little Green Footballs, and the not-quite-a-blog Real Clear Politics.com. Libertarians will enjoy Reason.com and perhaps econ-blogs including Cafe Hayek and Marginal Revolution. There's also fivethirtyeight.com (see our related interview) with Nate Silver).

• You can find your polling place with some help from Google and Vote411.org. Or you can read an argument about why not to vote and some confessions from a lapsed voter.

• Both Slate and the Drudge Report, at least in the past, have published exit polls before voting ended. (This led to legal threats against Slate in February 2000.) This week, Matt Drudge also posted a memo from the McCain campaign saying, basically, that exit polls may favor Obama: "We would discourage a rush to judgment based on the exit polls and wait until there has been a representative sampling of actual tabulated results from a variety of counties and precincts in a state. "

• Experience some badly-needed comic relief at Comedy Central's Indecision 2008 Blog, where staffers will be liveblogging all day. Along the same lines is The Onion's War for the White House and Saturday Night Live's election site. Plus: gaffes!

• If you insist on getting your news and entertainment the old-fashioned way, we're honor-bound to recommend our colleagues at CBS News. Also, some areas can access Comcast Central, which offers a multiple channels, each in its own window, and switchable audio. If the polls are right, don't dawdle: this could be an early evening.

CNET's Stephanie Condon contributed to this report.