Free press is free press. You can’t punish the networks for providing information. If it’s not them, it’ll be someone online. You just can’t hold back that information at the moment.

I’m a bit torn on the issue. I do thing it would suck to know the outcome of the race before I was able to vote. However, people need to realize there is much more to voting than just picking a President. We have House and Senate seats to decide, judges to kick out, and so on.

If there is a solution, it should be done by the federal government. Perhaps a law that doesn’t allow the releasing of results until lets say 9pm EST. Or perhaps a few of the battleground states getting together and saying they won’t. If just Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida would agree to wait on releasing results till later, it would alleviate a lot of the problems.

But since elections are so localized, I just don’t know you could enforce anything on a major level. I’m also not sure if we should. I’d rather inform people that there are more names on a ballot than the two Presidential candidates.

That’s what they are most likely paid for by the US$600 million of Obama machine.

We should be happy. At least Obama is spending his campaign money. The worst part might be that he would keep those money for himself, as per his own history in Chicago (thanks to Tony Resco).

Clue: Obama doesn’t want to share his money to state/local democrat candidates. Case in point? Murtha still had to publicly announce his formal request (read prayer) for money from Obama, the Messiah.

First, every network wants to be able to say, “We were the first to call the race.”

This year, however, they all want to be able to call it for Obama as early as possible so they can start partying. Then they can spend the rest of the night talking about the end of the GOP, the end of John McCain, what a drag Palin was on the GOP ticket, how badly George Bush hurt McCain, etc. You get the idea.

To paraphrase a great line from the movie “Major Leage” —– “I don’t care much for the press, so I’d like to them to have to eat a big sh__burger.” Here’s hoping.

then the answer is that they look at exit polling information form the states. As they get more and more exit poll info they get to a point where they feel confident that they know the overall shape of the turn out and can predict a winner because the remaining population to vote may be somewhat skewed from the overall but won;t be completely skewed to one candidate or the other.

That’s why they are able to call races while voting continues.

But exit polls are pretty notoriously unreliable and so their methodology is highly questionable.