I was going to follow the elections tonight. Really, I was — I had Medill’s election blog bookmarked and everything!
I remember staying up so late during 2000 and 2004, following every tidbit. I even installed an automatic page refresher so I wouldn’t have to click reload on all my pages every 30 seconds.
But this year, this lead to that, and now it’s 2 a.m. and, except for the Senate, everything’s pretty much over.
Which is the funny thing about news. It’s so intense and fun as you’re checking for the very, very latest, and yet, on election night more than any night of the year, news decays really quickly. For all the minute-by-minute speculation and polling and opinion and rumors, at the end of the night, there’s a winner and there’s a loser and once that’s known, nothing else matters.
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One area of election coverage stood out this year though: all the reports of harassment, questionable practices and intimidation. I feel like this has happened every year and with the Internet, it’s just being collected a lot more thoroughly – but Slate’s election-problems blog is a great, if scary, read.