News Cycle

As expected, Sen. John McCain has taken Tennessee and Oklahoma, giving him 34 electoral votes.

Sen. Barack Obama has won his home state of Illinois. He has also been declared the winner in Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, and the District of Columbia. This pushes his electoral college count to 77.

One hour after the polls have closed in Virginia, state officials say Sen. John McCain is leading 53 percent to 43 percent. This represents more than 20 percent of the vote in that key state.

NBC has declared Sen. John McCain as the winner in South Carolina. That was expected. He will earn eight electoral votes there.

Democrat Mark Warner on Tuesday won his bid to replace retiring Republican Sen. John Warner in the U.S. Senate race in Virginia, a victory that will help Democrats solidify their hold on Congress.

All the major networks have called this race. With six percent of the precincts reporting, Warner has 57 percent of the vote.

Warner, a popular former governor, beat Republican Jim Gilmore, also a former governor. Warner’s election means Democrats will hold both U.S. Senate seats as well as the governor’s mansion in this once solidly Republican Southern state.

Sen. Barack Obama was won Vermont and its three electoral votes.

Early results from the polls that have already closed in Indiana show Sen. Barack Obama leading Sen. John McCain, 50 percent to 49 percent, at 6:45 p.m. Eastern. This result, which represents only two percent of the state total, comes from rural areas in which the GOP outnumber Democrats by 3 to 1.

If these trends were to continue for the rest of the night, it’s going to be a short evening. Obama was expected to trail early in Indiana and catch up when polls close in the western portion of the state at 7 p.m. Eastern. McCain was supposed to be strong in the rural areas while Obama was to fare well in Gary.

Sen. John McCain has won in a strong showing in Kentucky, earning 62 percent of the vote in early results. Sen. Barack Obama has the same margin in New Hampshire, but that state is still in question. Both states closed their polls about 20 minutes ago.

Portions of Indiana have closed their polls, but no results are in.

Kentucky has eight electoral votes, Indiana has 11, and New Hampshire has four.

In the Kentucky Senate race, early returns have incumbent Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell with a slight lead over his Democratic opponent Bruce Lunsford, 54 percent to 46 percent, at 6:30 p.m. Eastern.

There are already a number of reports of voting problems in key battleground states such as Virginia, Pennsylvania and Florida.

At one precinct in Philadelphia, guards wearing Black Panthers attire and armed with nightsticks are in front of the doors of a polling site intimidating voters. Here is raw footage filmed by a student.

Here is a news report from FOX:

And here is raw footage of the pair being dealt with by police:

David Bario, writing for The American Lawyer at amlawdaikly.com, reports:

The polls have only been open a few hours, but reports of malfunctioning voting machines and overwhelmed polling stations already are flooding in. Jonah Goldman, director of the National Campaign for Fair Elections, says he and other Election Protection partners are most concerned so far about Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Florida, where massive voter turnout is overwhelming already vulnerable voting systems.

In Virginia, election protection monitors are describing massive machine breakdowns, which are being compounded by the absence of state provisions to provide back-up paper ballots when the machines fail. Voters in Richmond, Chesapeake, Fairfax, and Arlington are stuck in long lines, and some are being given provisional ballots to speed up the process. Those provisional ballots should be treated like regular ballots, Goldman says, but there are concerns that they will not be. There also are reports of voters being turned away from the polls and voter intimidation. Over two dozen polling places opened late, leading Election Protection officials to call for voting hours to be extended by two hours. Check back for more on the situation in Virginia later this afternoon.

Pennsylvania has similar reports of long lines and malfunctioning machines. In Pittsburgh, poll workers were so overwhelmed that local election authorities deputized Election Protection monitors in the spot to deal with the crowds.

In Florida, in addition to long lines, at least two dozen polling places centered in the Tampa and St. Petersburg areas have reported malfunctioning optical scan machines.

In Virginia, water dripping from an early-morning rain onto optical-scan paper ballots have made some of the ballot impossible to scan, Ryan Enright, a spokesman for the State Board of Elections, told CNN.

Election officials are encouraging voters to dry off before filling out ballots. Damp ballots will be allowed to dry before being tabulated, Enright said. This step will mean a longer processing time for election officials, but it should not affect voters’ wait times, he said.

Karl Rove has predicted a huge win for Sen. Barack Obama today by 138 electoral votes.

The final Rove & Co. electoral map of the 2008 election cycle points to a 338-200 Barack Obama electoral vote victory over John McCain tomorrow, the largest electoral margin since 1996. All remaining toss-up states have been allocated to the candidate leading in them, with Florida (27 EV) going to Obama, and Indiana (11 EV), Missouri (11 EV), North Carolina (15 EV), and North Dakota (3 EV) going to McCain. The two candidates are in a dead heat in Missouri and North Carolina, but they go to McCain because the most recent polls conducted over this past weekend show him narrowly ahead. Florida, too, could end up in McCain’s column since he’s benefited from recent movement in the state.

Here is his map and comments.