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Vox Sentences: Your election night coverage survival kit

Vox Sentences is your daily digest for what's happening in the world, curated by Dara Lind and Dylan Matthews. Sign up for the Vox Sentences newsletter, delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday, or view the Vox Sentences archive for past editions.

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

Voters! 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


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]