Don’t you wish elections ended like Animal House? I refer not to a wildly destructive parade in which cartoonish villains receive their comic comeuppance (although that too would be entertaining: ramming speed, Mr. President!), but to the handy denouement subtitles that let you know what becomes of the characters we met along the way?

Well, the time has come for someone to put his foot down. And that foot is me. I hereby declare our first and only post-election pre-future imagineering challenge. Let’s imagine what lies ahead for the people we got to know, love, hate and imagine naked*. Here are a few examples of what I mean: Continue…

It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different; that their voice could be that difference.

One thing—among many—to take away from tonight. Millions of people who did not believe, chose, again or for the first time, to believe. Blind faith is no doubt dangerous, but there is perhaps nothing more destructive than cynicism, none more lost than those who do not believe in anything, no point if there is no hope. And the images of the night were not of that stage in Chicago, but of the people watching and celebrating across the United States, many seeming to see and feel something they had not before.

Whether or not candidate Obama was worthy of that is infinitely debatable, but it is now for President Obama to justify that belief. Or, at the very least, conduct himself in a way that gives those millions reason enough to keep believing in this stuff. It is an obviously daunting and vaguely pivotal task.

That’s for tomorrow and the next four years. Tonight, the Detroit Free Press, speaking to perhaps the most depressed city in America and a population with every excuse to have long ago given up, entitled its lead editorial, “Time to believe.” The paper’s editors concluded as follows.

“Candidate Obama always stressed change. But he became more than just the anti-Bush. In these worrisome days and weeks, change became secondary to believing. And the president-elect has earned Americans’ belief in him.”

Remarks of President-Elect Barack Obama—as prepared for delivery

Election Night

Tuesday, November 4^th, 2008

Chicago, Illinois

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

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Bobby Kennedy called it 40 years ago. At last, America can now hope for the more perfect union. This is history in the making and a great day for equality and humanity. Enjoy it.

Is happening over here.

The best part of the election coverage, by far, is Jessica Yellin, the magic hologram lady on CNN. Cutting-edge video technology. And Wolf Blitzer, proving once again that you can’t get anything by him, sums it all up: “It’s still Jessica Yellin, and you look like Jessica Yellin, and we know you are Jessica Yellin!” Oh, Wolf. You’re so perceptive.

I’m over here, liveblogging the super-historic election returns with Coyne and Feschuk. Or I will be as soon as I can figure out how to log in. Shouldn’t be long. Probably solved by the time you see this. Go see for yourself. Fun!

Why does it take so long to vote for President?

Would you prefer a Republican railroad commissioner, or a Libertarian one? Video lottery terminals to fund public education—yea or nay? How about euthanasia? Gay marriage? Adoption rights for unmarried couples? Think fast! These are the sorts of agonizing questions Canadians don’t have to deal with during federal election campaigns. But in Texas, Maryland, Washington, Arizona, Arkansas and other states, voters must decide on these crucial matters of statehood at the same time they choose between John McCain and Barack Obama (and Bob Barr and Ralph Nader, for that matter). To take a purely random example, residents of Crystal, Minn., vote today for a President, a Senator, a Congressman or woman, a state representative, mayor, and soil and water conservation supervisors for three separate districts, as well as on amending the state constitution to protect safe drinking water and on two separate funding issues regarding the local school board. In Fort Bend County, Tx., there’s all that plus a state senator, a straight-party vote (Republican, Democrat or Libertarian), the aforementioned railroad commissioner, more than a dozen judgeships, and county attorney, sheriff, tax assessor, comissioner, justice of the peace and constable.

In part, this explains one of the other key differences between Canadian and American elections: the often enormous queues, especially in urban areas. There are reports today of 75-to-90 minute waits in Virginia (a state notorious for election mayhem), and three hours in New York City. Computer glitches during early voting in Georgia, meanwhile, led to waits of up to eight hours during the early polling last Monday. Having whittled the wait down to two to three hours by the next day, election officials in Gwinnett and Fulton counties actually sounded pleased. “So far, so good,” one told the Journal-Constitution.

Macleans.ca asked Stuart Comstock-Gay, director of the Democracy Program at Demos, a non-partisan public policy research organization that monitors voting irregularities, for his top three causes for long lines at the polls. Continue…

The race speech is the one for the history books, but this might be the speech of the campaign.

ITQ will be liveblogging her way through the Ottawa election-watching party circuit tonight, so check back around 7pm for sporadic – but hopefully entertaining – updates. (There may even be berrycam pictures if I can figure out how to post from the road. Or pub, as the case may be.)

In the meantime, you can always try your hand at the macleans.ca US election quiz. Feel free to brag about your score (or gripe about how obscure and/or wrong the questions were) in the comments.

6:26:52 PM
Good evening, electoral sports fans! Is everyone ready for a long, stressed out, progressively incoherent evening of staring intensely at the television? I know I am. Actually, part of me is regretting not hauling my laptop out on the town; we’ve only got results from two states trickling in, and I’m already getting confused. Obama is behind in Kentucky? All lost! End nigh! (Pause.) Oh, he wasn’t expected to win that? Never mind, then.

I’m heading to what will likely turn out to be the election-watching party of the night, but first, have stopped in a local pub for fried food in anticipation of a long night to come. I don’t know if I’ll be updating as often as I would during, say, an Ethics committee meeting, but I’ll do my best to check in every twenty or thirty minutes, just to give you a sense of how this town is responding to what will be, one way or another, a historic(tm) night. (Sorry, I promise not to use that word again tonight unless there is absolutely no other option.)

7:58:50 PM
Okay, it’s been a lot longer than half an hour since I updated, but I had important intense staring obligations — staring at the two sets of results coming in, and asking annoying questions of my companions about why it was that McCain seemed to be ahead in the tiny circle on the right side of the CNN screen. But when the Eastern Seaboard states came in – New Jersey, Massachussets, all those other old faithfuls, a cheer went up in the bar, and I felt I had to immortalize the moment. Also, I was finally able to tear myself away from the TV long enough to find my BlackBerry.

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Must-reads: Doug Saunders and Jonathan Kay on President Obama; John Ivison on Ontario’s finances.

Y’all better be right
Note to supremely confident pundits: if Barack Obama doesn’t win tonight, we’re coming after you.

The Globe and Mail’s Jeffrey Simpson wins the prize for most strident premature declaration of Obama victory, arguing “this business in recent days of ‘how [John] McCain can win’ was sheer journalistic foolishness,” and that Americans “will vote—and vote decisively—for Senator Obama” today. And while he’s sure Obama will break some of his election promises—indeed, as is Simpson’s habit, he urges him to—and that “there will be some Americans who will resent him as a black president,” we can now look forward to having “that most cherished of attributes: judgment” back in the White House. Good judgment, he means, and we agree. But if McCain somehow pulls off a miracle, Simpson’s pretty much going to have to resign his column.

Count Peter Worthington, who can’t get past McCain’s “uncanny gift of salvaging victories from seemingly certain defeats,” among the journalistically foolish. Polls “indicate a certain volatility among the electorate,” he opines in the Toronto Sun, and the wide range of polling results indicates “unease among those who analyze and predict.” In short, he says, “uncertainty reigns.” Who’ll stay home? Where will the undecideds go (to McCain, Worthington suspects)? Will there be a meteor strike? Stay tuned…

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I saw this photo of voters lining up this morning at  Andrew Sullivan’s blog and realized it was not only relevant to this post, but also taken at our local polling place. (Photo: voting at Martin Luther King Jr Library in Washington DC, by Brendan Smialowski/Getty.)

***

Finally, Election Day is finally here! It’s been a long haul. This campaign has been going on since — well, in some ways since the Republican Convention in 2004 when Bush was up for reelection and people like Rudy Giuliani were starting to gear up for 2008. It’s hard to believe that I spent the Fourth of July with Joe Biden campaigning at a barbecue in Iowa and watching Hillary and Bill Clinton making their first joint campaign appearance at the state fairgrounds — back in July 2007 that is!

Much has been made in this campaign season about the “Bradley effect” — the phenomenon in which opinion polls overstate the support for an African American candidate because people are afraid to tell pollsters they’re not voting for the black guy for fear of looking racist. Pollsters have been arguing back and forth for the past few months about whether such an effect exists, whether it ever existed, and whether it will result in Obama underperforming what the polls predict.

But as I read various accounts of voters’ experiences at the polling places today, one think is striking. So many of them say they wanted to go vote to make sure they are “part of history.” Suppose they like the candidate and be inclined to vote for him but have other demands on their time, or they may be sitting on the fence, how much more likely are they to turn out to vote in order to be a “part of history?” I haven’t seen anyone try to quantify this. I’ve heard some African Americans put it in slightly different terms: that they wanted to be sure to vote for Obama so that they could tell their grandchildren that when they had the chance to vote for the first black president, they showed up. It’s not just frustration with the Bush years that is driving record numbers to the polls today. The sense of history is playing a role too. Continue…

The rallies are over, the hoopla has ended, and the seemingly endless stream of opinion surveys has finally given way to voting day. An inordinately high number of voters have already cast their ballot in advanced polls. But it’s today that America will choose its 44th president. Last night, I attended the final rally of Barack Obama’s campaign in Virginia and was able to hear up close the powerful oratory of the Democratic contender. It was truly spectacular.

Senator McCain did a seven-state tour on the last day of the campaign to present his closing arguments–lower taxes, a strong foreign policy, and fiscal conservatism. He asked for one more mission on behalf of his country. It was touching, but not very convincing. Continue…