talkpolitics | ★ ☆ ★ ø¤º° Welcome to the Election Results Post °º¤ø ★ ☆ ★

NBC News projects the Republican Party will retain control of the House.
NBC News projects President Obama will be re-elected as of 11:30 PM.

Be sure to vote! If you aren't sure what the legal requirements are to vote, or when the polls close,you can use this chart below. California polls will not close until 12 midnight on the East coast.

Here is your ultimate guide to watching the elections online below:

Polls are closing in Indiana and Kentucky at 3 p.m. PT / 6 p.m. ET on Tuesday. Check out this Politico map for poll closing times in every state, or check this site if you need to find your own polling place before it closes.
The Daily News and The Colbert Report will be streaming their live election coverage (gracefully titled - The Daily Show: Election Night, This Ends Now! & The Colbert Report: Election 2012: A Nation votes, Ohio decides: the Re-presidenting of America: who will replace Obama ‘012! Additionally, you can watch via through iOS and Android enabled devices, xBox, and other formats via the The Daily Show Headlines App.
MSNBC streaming live.
ABC News will be streaming live election coverage on YouTube as well as through its iPad app starting at 4 p.m. PT.
NBC will stream its election coverage on its Democracy Plaza site as well as through its NBC News Xbox app starting at 4 p.m. PT.
CBS News will have seven hours of live coverage on Ustream.
Fox News will have a live webcast of its election coverage starting at 5 p.m. PT. The network is also partnering once again for Twitter to surface trends and sentiments from millions of tweets.
Univision’s Spanish-language election night coverage starts at 4 p.m. PT on YouTube.
Fox News Latino will host Spanish-language live coverage on its site starting at 6 p.m. PT.
CNN will stream its election night coverage on its website as well as to to its iOS apps.
MSN News is streaming live on its website.
Comedy Central will stream live episodes of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and the Colbert Report on its website as well as its iOS and Android apps staring at 8 p.m. PT.
PBS NewsHour will have a total of six streams with live election coverage on Ustream.
C-SPAN is live streaming its election coverage starting at 5 p.m. PT. C-SPAN’s live feed comes with closed captions, which can be turned on here.
Al Jazeera English will have live coverage of the election results on its website, its mobile apps, Facebook and YouTube.
Yahoo’s election control room features live video from ABC News, live updates from the Yahoo News staff and a tie-in with Yahoo’s IntoNow second-screen app.
The Wall Street Journal will be on YouTube with a live stream as well, which will also be available through its WSJ live apps on the iPad, on Android devices and various Smart TV platforms.
The New York Times will host its own election results show straight out of its newsroom starting at 4 p.m. PT, and the site will take down its paywall to make its entire coverage available to everyone for 24 hours starting 3 p.m. PT.
Politico’s live election coverage starts at 4 p.m. PT.
The Washington Post will stream live coverage on its website and on YouTube. In addition, it will feature its The Fix columnist on a Ustream-hosted live stream.
The Huffington Post will have liver coverage of the election available on its website as well as through its HuffPost Live iPad app.
Video The Vote, a group dedicated to documenting voting problems, will be live streaming throughout the day on Ustream.
Aereo will make its broadcast streaming service freely available to anyone in New York from 6 p.m. ET to 6.a. ET the following day.
Twitter is providing curated tweets on its #election2012 micro-site.
Facebook is doing some neat live data visualization around their member’s voting.

Ezra Klein , Washington Post.
Jeff Greenfield, PBS.
Tom Brokaw, NBC News.
John Heilemann, New York Magazine.
Rachel Maddow , MSNBC.
Doris Kearns Goodwin, presidential historian and author.
Sean Hannity, Fox News
Bill Maher, HBO
David Brooks New York Times
Politifact, Tampa Bay Times.
Jay Carney, White House Press Secretary.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, DNC Chairwoman.
Reince Priebus, RNC Chairman.
David Axelrod, Former Senior Advisor to President Barack Obama.
Eric Fehrnstrom, Senior Romney campaign adviser.

1. California and the death penalty. Proposition 34 would end the state's costly and inefficient experiment with capital punishment and transform all existing death penalties (725 in all) into life sentences without the possibility of parole.

2. Marijuana. Voters in six states will be voting on marijuana initiatives. In Arkansas and Masschusetts, voters will decide whether to legalize, regulate, and tax medical marijuana. In Montana, voters will decide whether to repeal their 2004 medical-marijuana initiative. And in Colorado, Washington, and Oregon, voters will decide whether to legalize, regulate and tax recreational marijuana. Of the latter contests, the Colorado measure, Amendment 64, appears to have the best chance of passage. None of these measures is technically legal under federal law but the Obama Administration went on the record recently, in a 60 Minutes segment, pledging not to harass individual users.

3. Same-Sex Marriage. Voters in four states** -- Maryland, Minnesota, Maine and Washington -- will vote on same-sex marriage initiatives. In Maine, the vote is to overturn or ratify a 2009 measure that outlawed same-sex marriage. In Maryland, the vote is to affirm or reject a new law permitting same-sex marriage. And in Washington, the vote is to endorse or preclude a similar new law.

4. Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The most infamous lawman in America -- and longstanding sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona -- is heading toward yet another reelection victory. This despite a series of recent political scandals, costly litigation and allegations of fiscal mismanagement.

5. Judiciary. In four states closely aligned with Tea Party sentiment -- Arizona, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Florida-- conservative activists seek through ballot measures to limit judicial authority and independence through a series of partisan initiatives. The most blatant of these efforts is in Florida, where Americans for Prosperity, the Koch brothers-sponsored group, is seeking to remove three justices of the Florida Supreme Court. Millions have been spent on that race alone. Follow William Raftery's Gavel To Gavel blog on election night if you want the play-by-play. Here is his list of all judiciary-related amendments.

6. Alabama segregation. For the second time in eight years, voters in Alabama will have an opportunity to delete from their state constitution an explicit reference to racial segregation in public schools. The language currently on the books, a vestige of the state's dubious history of interposition, states:

To avoid confusion and disorder and to promote effective and economical planning for education, the legislature may authorize the parents or guardians of minors, who desire that such minors shall attend schools provided for their own race, to make election to that end, such election to be effective for such period and to such extent as the legislature may provide.

It seems simple. But it's not. Many Democrats and school administrators believe the initiative would make matters worse. And speaking of which, Alabama voters will get a chance again on Tuesday to choose or reject for the judiciary Roy Moore, the infamous former state supreme court justice who once defied a federal court order forcing him to remove the Ten Commandments monument he had ordered built at the state's supreme court.

7. Abortion. In Florida, voters will confront Amendment 6, a measure that seeks to limit interpretation of the privacy rights contained in the state's constitution. In Montana, voters face LR-120, which involves parental-notification rules. In Oklahoma, a "personhood" measure that would have criminalized abortion was rejected as unconstitutional by the state's supreme court before it could make it onto the ballot. In case you were wondering, following a campaign where abortion and reproductive rights were issues, this isn't much different than 2010, when there were also three similiar measures (in Alaska, Colorado, and Missouri).

8. Health Care. Silly you, you thought the Supreme Court's decision in June to uphold the Affordable Care Act meant the end of legal challenges to the federal health care law. Wrong. New litigation has been filed. And voters in five states -- Alabama, Florida, Missouri, Montana and Wyoming -- will have the opportunity on Tuesday to weigh in with their views of the obligations contained in the Care Act. The gist of each of these measures is made clear in the simple language of Wyoming's proposed Amendment A:

The adoption of this amendment will provide that the right to make health care decisions is reserved to the citizens of the state of Wyoming. It permits any person to pay and any health care provider to receive direct payment for services

9. Three-strikes. Back to California for Proposition 36, which would reduce the scope of the state's notorious three-strikes law in an effort to clear overcrowded prisons there of more non-violent offenders. Like Proposition 34, the popularity of this initiative is owed perhaps as much to the budget savings the state would see from it as it is from the fact that the existing "three-strikes" law has resulted in terrible injustice to some Californians. If it passes -- and it was up in the polls the last time I checked -- it will be the clearest signal yet that states are serious about adjusting their views of the harsh costs of our prison society.

10. Death with dignity. Voters in Massachusetts face Question 2, which upon approval would mean a new state law "allowing a physician licensed in Massachusetts to prescribe medication, at the request of a terminally-ill patient meeting certain conditions, to end that person's life." The measure has been consistently in front in polling although its margin has slipped in the past few weeks. It's an important moment for supporters of a "right to die." It's been long enough for them to have comforting research on how Oregon's landmark law has worked. But they've struggled to translate that information into legislative success.

Source. The Atlantic.

Many thanks to Mr.

weswilson who mentioned this. Great, great stuff.

When Republicans Were Blue and Democrats Were Red

We take the visual maps used all over the Internet and TV for granted. But that wasn't always the case. Prior to 1976, it was a pretty boring visual experience. For the Bicentennial election, NBC News anchor John Chancellor developed the idea for a super sized map that would change colors as a state was declared for one candidate. But at that time, Blue was used for Republicans, and red was used for Democratic candidates. Why? Mr. Chancellor and the director of election coverage at NBC Roy Wetzel, decided to use the British color system: “Without giving it a second thought, we said blue for conservatives, because that’s what the parliamentary system in London is, red for the more liberal party. And that settled it. We just did it,” said Wetzel, now retired.

Source: Smithsonian Magazine.