Your election-watching guide

PoliticsWatch has a fine list of bellwether ridings and other ones-to-watch. Key early warning signals: Fredericton, Pontiac, Sarnia-Lambton. The Tories will need those to win. If they take St. Paul's and Etobicoke-Lakeshore, they're in majority territory. The Great Colby has his own list of notables here and here, including Winnipeg South Centre and Kenora, two ridings very near and dear to me. The Globe's Rheal Seguin rounds up the best prospects for the Tories in Quebec. Finally, the excellent ElectionPolls blog has ranked the ridings in order of their likelihood of voting Tory, just like the pros do. Don't know what his methodology is, but the results seem plausible. So if you see Miramichi (NB) and Malpeque (PEI) with a "C" beside them, then Stephen Harper is the next mayor of Majorityville. (If they win Vancouver East, I'll be taking reservations for the next event horizon back to the parallel universe we just left.) ALSO: ChrisNolan has done a highly informative Google Maps (true dat! double-true!) mashup on all 308 ridings, with the help of AJAX and Ruby on Rails. I have no idea who these people are, but I'm assuming they're some friends he met at the latest "rave" or whatever the kids are doing these days. A POLLSTER WRITES:

After all of the polling 101 I've been giving on this site the least you could do is promo our exit poll tonight on Global! About 30 questions with a huge panel of voters. We've already got 20,000 respondents in the hopper. We may get as many as 40,000. Tonight you've got three options. You can listen to talking heads (CBC), look at pre-election polls that you already know about (CTV), or see brand new data on why voters did what they did today. That's only available on Global. Tara Nelson and I will be putting up data all night long. So, if you can't get enough of this stuff, tune in to Global.

Snappy answer #1: "Sorry, what station was that again? " Snappy answer #2: "'Tara Nelson and I will be putting up data all night long?' Is that what they call it these days?" Snappy answer #3: "I do hope we will not be hearing any of that exit poll data before all the polls have closed, as I am a strong supporter of the Elections Act prohibition on such sharing of information."