Watching election returns (for the obsessive)

I’ve been obsessed with the election for over a year, and I’m just as obsessed today. Here’s a disorganized guide to election return watching that I’ll be updating throughout the day.

First of all, ignore exit polls and hope that whatever network you’re watching for returns does the same.

Here’s a short list of what to look for tonight, and here’s an election night viewer’s guide from Nate Silver. John Dickerson lets you know what to look for all day today.

My current plan for tonight is to watch the returns on HDnet, but we’ll have to see whether my wife will go along with that. Dan Rather is nutty enough to be fun, and he has a really interesting list of guests. Because HDnet isn’t one of the major news organizations, they don’t have any of the big name, low information pundits and instead have to make do with people who actually know what they’re talking about.

I’ll be flipping over to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s live election show at 10pm.

I won’t be live blogging the returns simply because it takes too much energy. I will most likely be on Twitter, and I may post updates here if I feel so moved, but I expect to be glued to the TV rather than glued to the computer tonight.

If I am looking at the computer, it’ll be to watch the vote totals creep up, most likely on CNN. To get the results straight from the horse’s mouth, here are the sites where official returns are posted from some states I’m interested in. Usually they’re behind CNN, but it never hurts to look when you’re feeling impatient:

• North Carolina
• Georgia
• Virginia
• Florida – This site is already slow, that’s troubling.
• Pennsylvania
• Indiana
• Ohio
• Colorado – I’m suspecting that this is where the results will be posted when they start arriving.
• New Mexico
• Nevada – Nevada has a very fancy site, perhaps to cater to people who are betting on the election.

Update: Google is publishing real-time returns as well. (Turns out this is where the map on Talking Points Memo comes from.)

Update: How many Democratic volunteers are out on the streets? So many that I got sideswiped in traffic by another car, and it happened to be driven by an Obama volunteer. Oddly neither car was damaged and we wound up talking about volunteering for a bit and then went on about our business.