What to expect early on election night

Game on!

Two years of campaigning have come to an end. The results are going to start rolling in soon. In fact, depending on how close the vote is, you may see TV networks start reporting some results as early as 6:00 p.m. ET/3:00 p.m. PT. Here's how Yahoo! News plans on keeping you informed on election night.

The schedule
The first polls close at 6:00 p.m. ET/3:00 p.m. PT in most of Indiana and parts of Kentucky.  We can expect the TV networks to start reporting results from certain precincts around then. Indiana, Kentucky and a series of others (including Virginia and Florida) close at 7:00 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT. If a candidate in those states is winning by a large margin, you may see the TV networks begin calling a winner of those states shortly after the polls close.  Yahoo! News will be keeping tabs on those reports through our Yahoo! Newsroom blog.

Please note: Yahoo! News will rely on our partners at the Associated Press to call the winner. So, you may see one news organization call a winner before we reflect it in our results. We will report other news organizations' assesments to keep you up to speed. But we will not change our results until our partners at AP have made their own assesment of a state's winner. Yahoo! News' official policy on this is below.

Maps, modules and other reporting fun
Over the course of the campaign, you may have become familiar with our political dashboard. Until now, it has projected an Electoral College winner based on the most recent poll averages. Yahoo! News will replace this poll projection map at 6:00 p.m. ET/3:00 p.m. PT with a results map, so no one confuses polls with actual results.

That means at 6:00 p.m. ET, you'll probably see a gray map because no results have been reported yet. The states will change color to reflect results as reported by our partners at the Associated Press. More on that process below.

You'll see this map in a variety of places on the site. A small version lives on Yahoo.com in the middle of the page. It will also be on top of our news story pages in a module that looks like this.  

In this module, you can launch a live video stream brought to you by our friends at ABC News NOW. If you want to look at the dashboard by itself, it lives here and offers deep-dive results on every state and for presidential, Senate and House races. The live stream and special story-page treatment go up at approximately 6:00 p.m. ET/3:00 p.m. PT.

How Yahoo! News plans to call the race
Every news organization has its own way of deciding how to report results and call the winner. We're partnering with the AP to provide the elections results. Here's the Official Yahoo! News calling policy:

Yahoo! News will rely on AP to call the state winners on Election Night. The electoral count and colors of states on the Yahoo! News electoral map will only change after AP has called a race. AP’s complete Election Night guidelines can be found at http://www.ap.org/elections2008/index.html.

Yahoo! News also will report when at least two networks call a state winner. But the electoral count and colors of states on the Yahoo! News electoral map will not change based on network results. Yahoo! News only will report results from networks in the National Election Pool, which includes ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News and NBC News.