Election in a nutshell via professional pollster friend

"after the last two elections the nets have gotten much more conservative in their calling of states. so if they call something they have a high degree (est at 99.5% confidence) of faith that it's true. an early call in some place like PA means they most likely have a very wide margin of victory in the exit polls even if they aren't telling us what that number is. they also tend to use actual results from polling places they've collected to confirm the exit polling, but again those actual real results are ones that aren't publicly available yet."

but so it's all fake - exit polls people lie - there are no ballots .. how do you trust that?

"By sampling enough people you reduce to a small percent the chance of enough bad info (ie liars) entering the survey to change the results"

"also, a key part of what they do is look in very fine detail at where geographically the exit polls are showing the leads and comparing that turnout to past turnout and results. my colleague at AV who knows obama won florida says it's based on obama extremely out performing kerry and gore in key areas. in PA the call was easy because the margin was wide and they could see how he was winning demographic groups, like college educated whites, who dems have never won there in 40 years."

so are you confident it's obama?
when does he win a Bush state?

"Confident it's Obama. I think Indiana of north Carolina will be official in the next hour"

......

My sister was #1233 in MN
Her boy pal was #98
She had no lines and things went smoothly.

Looking at Franken
And Prop 8 here