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Vox Sentences: Your election night coverage survival kit
Instead of sending you “news” that will immediately become olds, we’re giving you a guide to interpreting all the information that’s going to get thrown at you tonight.
The Vox Sentences guide to watching election results
Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images
- Whenever you want: Tell Vox how you’re feeling as our emotion tracker visualizes the national mood. [Vox / Soo Oh and Kavya Sukumar]
- While the polls are open: Keep an eye out for any voting irregularities or reports of suppression in your state via the Electionland site, run by ProPublica with a consortium of other media outlets. [Electionland / ProPublica]
- Early evening: Acquaint yourself with poll closing times — and get a sense of just how long you might be up tonight. [NYT / Anjali Singhvi and Jugal K. Patel]
- At 5 pm Eastern and then as polls close: Check out the exit poll results as they come in — but beware that exit pollsters might not have accounted for early voting and don’t have a great history with predicting the Latino vote. [Vox / Dara Lind]
- As results roll in: Instead of getting overwhelmed by state results, check out Matt Yglesias’s guide to which states to keep a close eye on. (Hint: It starts with Kentucky.) [Vox / Matt Yglesias]
- Throughout the night: Watch the results roll in on a big board (CNN’s is classic)...[CNN]
- ...while playing bingo with the cable news coverage. [Vox / Soo Oh, Javier Zarracina, Zachary Crockett, Agnes Mazur, and Lauren Katz]
- Waiting for a concession speech: Check out Politico’s video compilation of concession speeches past — and keep your fingers crossed that this year’s will be even half as gracious as past losers have been. [Politico]
- If you need an excuse to go to bed: Read this post, which explains that the last ballots to be counted will likely favor Hillary Clinton — so if the election is too close to call tonight, that’s good news for her. [Washington Post / Charles Stewart III and Edward B. Foley]
- Looking ahead: Whatever you do, don’t go to bed tonight thinking that this chapter in American life has ended. The effects of the past year and a half are going to persist for a very, very long time. [Vox / Jenée Desmond-Harris]
Miscellaneous
- This is how you shatter a glass ceiling: with a steel spike, or, alternatively, a diamond drill. [Slate / Laura Wagner]
- Hey, wait a second. Why do we vote in booths anyway? [Atlas Obscura / Sarah Laskow]
- Time zones. They’re bad. Let’s get rid of them. [NYT / James Gleick]
- On the mysterious metallic leaves of the peacock begonia plant. [The Atlantic / Ed Yong]
- In 1991, Chicago police cleared more than 80 percent of homicides. Last year, they barely cleared a quarter. [Washington Post / Kimbriell Kelly, Wesley Lowery, and Steven Rich]
Verbatim
- “We already knew that zombies are murderous reanimated heaps of putrid rotting flesh; worse yet, it appears they are also racist.” [McSweeney’s / Vijith Assar]
- “There’s no global network of girlfriends who want to rule the world.” [Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg to Bloomberg / Patrick Donahue]
- “In 2012, the Obama campaign brought in top talent from Google and Catalist, a Democratic data firm, to estimate the results of the election in real time. The early results did not look good for Mr. Obama. … Elan Kriegel, now the analytics director of the Clinton campaign, left for the bathroom to throw up.” [NYT / Nate Cohn]
- “In Hawaii, the land value tax was blamed for overdevelopment in locations such as Waikiki, where singer Joni Mitchell was inspired to write the lyrics ‘They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot.’ The land value tax was abolished there in the mid-1970s.” [Lincoln Institute]
- “Town clerks can choose the tie-breaking method for local elections. But, for years, the go-to method for the Secretary of State has been an old leather bottle and numbered balls. The two candidates pick a ball and drop it into the bottle. The bottle is shaken and the first ball to roll out of the neck is declared the winner.” [Eagle-Tribune / James Niedzinski]
Watch this: Neo-Nazis explain why they like Donald Trump
Four days before the US presidential election, white supremacists gathered for a rally in Pennsylvania. [YouTube / Mac Schneider and Branden Eastwood]
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By Cameron Peters
By Cameron Peters
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