Election Day '08: Where to get live results

Some, but not all, of us will have access to a television, where you can watch results stream in on ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC or Fox.

But for those of you stuck in cubicles beyond 6 p.m. EST, when the first polls close on the East Coast, here's a guide to the best places to find results, news, and opinion on the Web:

LIVE RESULTS

• This post. See the widgets at the bottom of this post? They'll be updating with results in real time.

• Google's 2008 Election Map:  One of the better data mashups on the Web that provides real-time results, sans opinion or commentary. Check out the big picture or dive into states for county-by-county results.

• The Associated Press: The AP is known for being on the front-lines of the data returns (they have stringers at every polling place in the country), and will be providing a continuous video stream starting at 7 p.m. EST. AP writers and editors will discuss returns, and you'll get live reports from the presidential campaign headquarters.

• CBS News: Our sister site has a Campaign '08 home page with analysis from Jeff Greenfield about what states are likely to be the earliest reliable indicators of a victory by John McCain or Barack Obama. (They also provided those neat widgets at the bottom of the page.)

• CNN: CNN's website is great for rapid returns, and they're usually reliable when it comes to calling states first (or telling you who has.) For local results, try CNN's Your Races, which lets you monitor the outcome of local ballot measures. If you want to use your cell phone, check out CNN's mobile election center, which features poll results, video, and breaking news alerts.

• The New York Times: Besides their fantastic interactive Election Day package, which includes an electoral map and a cool word cloud of readers' one-word thoughts, the paper will be sending out text alerts with the outcomes for presidential, house, senate, and governors' races.

• Slate: Apple iPhone users can download Slate's new Poll Tracker '08 application, which uses data from Pollster.com to provide polling updates from each state and charts with voting patterns from previous elections.

• C-SPAN:The public cable service has been mentioned on this blog before, and their coverage will run throughout the night.

• NPR: The popular public radio network has got a great interactive map and a list of what's going on at polling places, where.

• BusinessWeek: BusinessWeek's The Tech Beat blog is keeping a liveblog, of sorts, on what's going on via social media.

• Palm Beach Post: This battleground state's newspapers are on high alert. The Palm Beach Post has aggregated Twitter reports from polling stations around the state.

• Local/State Web sites: For example, the California secretary of state's MyVote site provides information for local results. Once polls close, some of these sites have county-by-county results for statewide offices, assembly races, and ballot measures.

• Electronic Frontier Foundation: Concerns with electronic voting machines? The ourvotelive.org Web site offers RSS feeds, raw text, and an embeddable widget to track potential e-voting and other voting problem.

LIVE COMMENTARY

• The blogosphere: Heavy hitters include Andrew Sullivan, Daily Kos, Little Green Footballs, and the not-quite-bloggy Real Clear Politics.com. Libertarians will enjoy Reason.com and perhaps econ-blogs including Cafe Hayek and Marginal Revolution. There's also the groundbreaking fivethirtyeight.com, which upended the way we journalists analyze polling results.

• The Drudge Report: Infamous for having published exit polls before voting ended, it's an "insider" place for the most sensational breaking news.

• YouTube and PBS: The two are jointly offering a "Video Your Vote" channel and encouraging voters to upload clips that are related to their voting experiences on November 4. You can sort by specific categories, including early voting, polling place problems, and voter intimidation.

• The Atlantic:Is Twittering commentary directly on their front page.

• Humor and satire: Check out at Comedy Central's Indecision 2008 Blog, where staffers will be liveblogging all day; The Onion's War for the White House; and Saturday Night Live's election site.

• CNET: Our other sister site has a great 2008 Technology Voter Guide and a 2008 election roundup.

• Twitter:A huge aggregate of what everyone's thinking in real-time on Twitter's Election 2008. Then visualize it here at An Orange America.

• Student publications: Journalism schools around the country are buzzing with activity. Some, like the one at Columbia University in New York, have portals to original reported local content. Northwestern's Medill is reporting out of their Washington bureau.

VOTER HELP

• Find your polling place with some help from Google and Vote411.org.

[Massive kudos to CNET's Declan McCullagh and Stephanie Condon.]