UPDATED 4:05 p.m.Todd Melby will be hosting live Election Night coverage on KFAI, 90.3 FM Minneapolis and 106.7 FM St. Paul on Tuesday, November 4. Listen in for interviews with Tim Pawlenty, Larry Jacobs, El Tinklenberg, Margaret Anderson-Kelliher and many, many others. The networks will have high-tech, interactive maps, but KFAI will have local results and great analysis. Tune in from 7 p.m.-11 p.m.
To find your polling place during the last few hours of voting — or to find official election results after the polls close — go to the Minnesota Secretary of State web page.
For national live coverage, starting at 6 p.m., tune in to the video livestream for Democracy Now’s special five-hour broadcast.
UPDATED 1:46 p.m. It’s too early to tell how the presidential election will shake down in the real world, but in Woogi World, Barack Obama is a happy man. Just-released results from what its organizers describe as the “first-ever national kids’ education and voting adventure” show that America’s children would elect Obama president in a landslide. By a tally of 473,919 to 333,092—the largest national kids’ mock election to date, with participation in all 50 states—children between the ages of 6-12 went for the Illinois Democrat. The poll was conducted by Studies Weekly in cooperation with Children’s Way, the non-profit responsible for the Woogi World Web site.
Also picking Obama, by a 2-to-1 margin, are customers at Grumpy Steve’s coffee shop at West St. Paul’s Wabasha Street Caves. More specifically, they’re picking Barackachinos over McCain Mavericks. Customers with I Voted stickers receive a $1 discount.
UPDATED 12:06 p.m. From the Minnesota Daily, by Jacob Grovum: Pollster SurveyUSA posted yesterday the results of a poll of 30,000 Americans (600 from every state) looking at a hypothetical matchup of Barack Obama and John McCain. The catch? The poll was conducted in 2006. See the site for yourself here. In the poll, Obama carried just Illinois, Hawaii and Washington D.C. leading to a Mondale/Reagan-esque landslide in the Electoral College—510 for McCain to just 28 for Obama. I think it’s safe to say we won’t see this kind of thing tonight, but who knows anymore? Based on this though, it is stunning how far Obama has come.
UPDATED 9:45 a.m. From the Minnesota Independent, by Paul Schmelzer: Unsure how to vote for Court of Appeals Judge or Soil & Water Supervisor? The Star Tribune has a handy tool for last minute research: Just enter your address and see your personal ballot, with a brief statement by each candidate. It’s how I learned that Rahn Workcuff, one of four candidates for Minneapolis Soil & Water Supervisor, lists his opposition to same-sex marriage as the most important issue in the race. (Suggested campaign slogan: “Gay marriage: Must be something in the water.”)
UPDATED 6:00 a.m. • Hart’s Location, New Hampshire, claimed the nation’s earliest voting, posting 17 votes for Barack Obama, 10 for John McCain, and two for Ron Paul shortly after midnight.
According to CNN, another small New Hampshire town, Dixville Notch, posted the first votes. Dixville Notch residents also voted shortly after midnight. The tiny (75 residents) town turned out all of its registered voters with 21 voting for Obama and 15 for McCain, reversing the Republican majority that has held since 1968.
POSTED 9 p.m., 11/3/08 • Beginning at about 6 a.m., we will update election news throughout the day. For those readers whose pre-election jitters keep you up all night, we have compiled a few lists of web sites to check early and late. They include citizen journalism sites, sites to report or monitor voting problems, and election news of many different kinds.
We invite you to contribute your election day stories — voter turnout in your precinct, voter challenging or intimidation that you have observed, interesting or humorous anecdotes, photos, and opinions. Click on Contribute News and submit your story directly or e-mail it to editor@tcdailyplanet.net.
Election web sites
• MINNESOTA SECRETARY OF STATE for all Minnesota voting information, including results after 8 p.m.
• Black Box Voting: election watchdog group focusing on voting machine malfunctions and mischief.
• CNN Voter Irregularities Map: calls from the CNN Voter Hotline (1-877-GOCNN-08)
• CNN election night poll closing times
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• CNN election calculator
• Community Values Vote: Election news from grassroots organizations
• Huffington Post’s Share your voting experiences form. The best stories will be published in On The Ground 2008.
• My Fair Election: Report your polling station’s condition on Election Day as part of a crowd-sourced map of electoral conditions across the United States.
• The New York Times Polling Place Photo Project: a nationwide experiment in citizen journalism that encourages voters to capture, post and share photographs of this general election.
• No Voter Left Behind.net, because an election is a terrible thing to steal. Use their one-point Theft Reporting System or volunteer to help.
• Our Vote Live: The official site documenting the groundbreaking voter assistance work of the Election Protection Coalition. Here, you can review in real-time reports of voter assistance calls made to 866-OUR-VOTE, Election Protection’s toll-free hotline.
• Twitter Vote Report: share your voting experiences and help get problems fixed in real-time on or before Election Day
• The UpTake: a non-partisan video citizen-journalism site, partnered with Video the Vote. Our Vote Chasers project encourages volunteers to use video camera phones (iPhone, Nokia N95, etc.) to document election abuses and stream footage live to the web in realtime.
• Video the Vote: national initiative to protect voting rights by monitoring the electoral process. We organize citizen journalists—ordinary folks like you and me—to document election problems as they occur
• YouTube’s Video Your Vote: a non-partisan program produced in partnership with PBS, encourages American voters to document their experiences at the polls on Election Day, and is also a one-stop-shop to view exclusive videos from voter registration experts, election reform activists, and state officials, as well as video footage from the PBS archives for a historical look at voting through the years.
• VoterStory ’08: collect and classify voter complaints in real time across the Internet and provide a data feed of complaints that can be addressed in real time by Voter Protection groups who partner with VoterStory; a nice embeddable widget to put on a web site.
• Wired’s Problem Reporting page: Had a problem casting your ballot in this year’s general election? We want to hear from you. Wired.com has created a map to track your issues, but we need your help to complete it. Web- and email-access.
• Work the Vote LA: with incident reporting forms for the Los Angeles area.
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