Is today fun for analytics or what!
There are numerous solutions for tracking the national results but what about the local level? For example a good friend of mine Dan Urban, (and somebody who I think actually cares about the common person and business) is running for Ohio State Representative (57th District) but how can I monitor his results? For that matter what are the options for monitoring state level elections?
Actually there are some pretty nice solutions. Click Read On for specifics.

Minnesota Public Radio has created an election day results widget for use to post and share. Great idea from a
“Minnesota Public Radio is providing live, customizable election-night results that you can easily include in your own Web site or blog. You can customize which races to track and the style of the display.”

Getting back to Ohio somebody seems to be updating a Google Spreadsheet with election results as they are counted. I speculate that one of the vote counting monitors must be doing the updating as the counts are announced. To gain state level results it seems as thought the best avenue, so far, is to monitor various blogs such as OhioVoter. There are some other solutions that seem to be less analytical and more traditional media coverage. ElectionOhio is one example of what appears to be live streaming of Election results.

As I thought about this I realized that it is probably best for to get state election coverage via the local news route. A channel 9 station, WTOV which seems to serve Ohio and West Virginia, is a good example of this. Cleveland’s Channel 5 seems to be sharing the same election day results application. Interestingly many news channels have created Election day portals which are full of just about every election day widget, feed, ticker and data stream that fits on a page. VoteSmartOhio is one example.

All this is further proof that we passed the information age and are now in an age where we have the tools, technology and skills to quickly integrate, mashup and use the information.