Election Night Design: Gaming and Planning

ITEM 1: There's a solid writeup of electoral vote scenarios at FiveThirtyEight.com expressing much of what we've been gaming out in our newsroom.

ITEM 2: Several weeks ago we worked to select a few Counties That Count, half-remembering* a prescient article that suggested a few Florida counties could decide the 2000 election.

Andrea Bernstein has counted our counties among her stops for The Takeaway, and points out that in the last few days Barack Obama has been doing the same -- visiting Clark County, Nevada; Pueblo County, Colorado; Prince William County, Virginia; and Palm Beach County, Florida.

This weekend, the journo-programmers at The Takeaway are working to make sure you can track the real-time election results from our Counties That Count on the show's website.

ITEM 3: To get more info in our face, I set an overhead monitor to flip through several websites automatically, for free. Here's how:

-- I put the Firefox 3 browser on a computer attached to the monitor
-- Next I installed the ReloadEvery Firefox add-on, which auto-reloads websites
-- Installed the Tab Slideshow add-on, which cycles through tabs at a set interval
-- Installed the Full Fullscreen add-on, which hides the Firefox toolbars
-- Pulled up several sites in separate tabs
-- Set ReloadEvery to 1 minute, and Tab Slideshow to 5 seconds
-- Turned on the Full Fullscreen feature to hide the toolbars
-- ... and voila!

* Anyone who remembers the specific article, please let me know!