The Radio-Television News Directors Association offers some good last-minute tips on getting ready to cover the vote including a primer on election poll laws and
exit polling.
Poynter's Julie Moos offers great ideas on what phone numbers to have programmed into your cell phone.
This is where CNN will post exit poll results Tuesday.
Remember, it was the exit polling that threw things off in 2000.
In 2004, the first exit polls suggested John Kerry would be elected President.
CNN explains how it will go about projecting winners.
Here is exit polling from
state primary elections just to give you background.
Joe Lenski, co-founder and executive vice president of Edison Media Research, which collects the exit polling data for ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, FOX and the AP,
discusses his organization's plans for conducting exit polls with the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.
The exit polling will include 1,300 precincts nationwide. Exit polling will be especially challenged this year by the fact that nearly 30 percent of voters cast their ballots before Election Day.
Here is Edison's Web site which gives more exit polling background.
Lenski told Pew how quickly we should see exit poll results and how quickly we should know what to make of their accuracy:
When will news organizations get exit-poll data?
At 5 p.m. ET the data are distributed to the news organizations. All of the subscribers work under the agreement that they will not release or publish any exit-poll data that will characterize the outcome of any race until all polls in that state have closed.
At what point in the evening will news organizations have a good idea how the race is going?
By about 8 or 9 p.m. we will have seen enough actual vote returns at the precinct level to be able to adjust for the non-response bias in several states.
See poll closing times nationwide.
