Blog Article
As a supplement to the DCRP's regular blog on Tuesday, Election Day, (we normally publish the blog on Tuesday and Friday), I will also be running a public live blog on Election Day.
I will be live blogging all day; first from the DCRP "Command Center" at Headquarters and then from the DCRP Watch Party in the evening.
Live blogs, as the name implies, will be created and displayed live and in real time. They will be mostly text but will contain a fair number of pictures and some inline video as time allows. My objective is to inform you of key events and news as it occurs. Also, I will try to capture the excitement of voting operations and the Watch Party as we begin to get information for local, state and national results.
The live blog will be surfaced to the public in two ways: (1) a "splash page" with a "widget" and (2) a regular live blog page.
The splash page will look like this:
This page will also become our primary home page just after 7 pm on Tuesday evening. The main H-1 headline in the center of the page will be the title of the most recent posting. The timestamp of the posting and its direct link to the posting will also be shown
Immediate below the "above-the-fold" area with the 3-D animation, the live-blog widget will be shown featuring short summaries of the three most-recent postings,
In addition, there is, of course, a regular live-blog page.
The URL link for the splash page is https://dallasgop.org/home-nov-8-live-blog and the live-blog page is https://dallasgop.org/live-blog. All of the pages are available now with introduction postings that also served to test the system and its processes. I may post sporadically on Monday and somewhat irregularly before lunch on Tuesday.
Starting VERY early Tuesday morning ("oh dark thirty") I will be using our GOTV home page. See https://dallasgop.org/home-republican-who-dont-vote-elect-democrats-edv which also feeds our Candidate Directory. Our Candidate Directory is getting tremendous traffic PLUS thousands of clicks from the Google engine alone. We will be supporting both Republican get-out-the-vote (GOTV_ efforts as well as showing our candidate slate.
After the polls close at 7 pm on Tuesday and I get relocated to the Watch Party, the home page for the DCRP will switch to be the splash page for the duration of the live blog after our "Thank You" displays while I switch venues (more below.)
I will start our live blogging in earnest on Election Day at about 1pm from the DCRP "Command Center" at the DCRP Headquarters. There will be sporadic posting in the morning as I do my own GOTV work in my precinct.
From the Command Center, we will be monitoring voting operations and other political activities happening around Dallas County.
I initially put "Command Center" in quotation marks so as not to convey the incorrect image. The term "Command Center" implies something like NASA's Mission Operations Control Room (MOCR-2) of the Apollo era.
I wish.
Actually, it is a bunch of cheap folding tables from Amazon and an odd assortment of folding chairs. Plus, a bunch of heavily-used cell phones and some notebook computers.
However, both were/are staffed by dedicated people collecting and assessing information. I will post on those topics that I think you will find interesting.
In addition to our DCRP crew, we will also be hosting the good folks from the Republican Party of Texas in Austin. Yes, the RPT will be conducting their primary monitoring all of Texas from our command center in Dallas. We're honored to be hosting them!
As the polls close at 7pm, we will move our live blogging operations, to the DCRP Watch Party at Smoky Rose Barbeque. Again, "operations" will consist of me, my notebook PC, my iPad and my smartphone. It is all very portable for field use. Everything is equipped with broadband wireless so I can live blog anywhere I can pause long enough to type. My wife and daughter will join me later in the evening after they close their Voting Center and do their turn-in. Their arrival at the party will be providing editorial copyediting support so you should see improvements in the copy. With live blogging, information flows hot and heavy and, as both a bad typist and a speed reader, I tend to be a terrible proofreader and, instead, focus on getting the posting out ASAP rather than being diligent about proofreading.
Early results of Dallas County will start coming in at about 7 pm. At 9 pm, we should start getting updates every 30 minutes from DCED. This is when things will start becoming fun. Our colleagues who worked so very hard for this election will gather as we'll start getting election results. It will be done in a party environment.
