Election Day is here! After months of planning and preparation, we here at CNN.com are excited to provide you with your election news and information on this historic day. We will be providing you with a lot of information, and we know that you may have questions about how some of the election processes work, where to find certain information or why we do things in certain ways. Below we have put together some of the more common questions and answers we expect. Got more questions? Send them to us through comments on this blog and we’ll do our best to respond!

How deep is CNN.com’s Elections Result Coverage?
CNN.com’s Elections Results coverage includes extensive data on the presidential, U.S. Senate, U.S. House and Governor races. This information is available at national, state and county levels.

Need a starting point? All of the coverage is easily accessible from the CNN.com home page. You can also go to our Election Results area to start diving in to our comprehensive Election Results coverage.

CNN.com also covers several key ballot measures, exit poll results and special coverage on key battleground states. In addition, every state has its own full results page so you can see all of the races, key ballot measures and latest projections in your state.

When do results start coming in?
Election results start coming in at approximately 6 p.m. ET as CNN begins receiving vote counts from the state precincts with the earliest poll closing times. Statewide poll closings start at 7 p.m. ET, with polls remaining open in some states until 1 a.m. ET. If there are multiple poll closing times in a state, CNN will not project a winner and only release select exit poll information for that state until the last poll closing time, even though vote counts may start appearing sooner. View the full list of last poll closing times. How do I read Exit Polls?

How does CNN make its projections?
CNN receives data from two key sources – AP and Edison Media Research – and uses a sample of precinct data from these sources. In races where results do not appear to be close, projections are made on exit poll data alone. In races that are close, CNN will wait for votes to be counted and reported. Read more about this process

How can I make my own projections?
You can calculate the likelihood of particular voting scenarios using CNN.com’s Electoral Map Calculator. This calculator allows you to create different scenarios and project the winner. On Election Night, the calculator will lock down CNN projections on a state-by-state basis while allowing you to choose winners for the remaining states and predict an outcome. Want information on what the latest polls are saying to help you make your pick? See the Election Tracker: Candidate Polls.

How can I keep track of races that I care about in one place?
You can track up to 35 races using the Your Races feature. Your Races allows you to select by race, state or location. You can start by entering your ZIP code, or you can customize Your Races by including different races and states you are interested in. Want to keep track of the battleground states? Simply select “battleground states” from the race menu, add them to Your Races and keep track of them throughout the night. Once you have made your selections, you will be asked to select your top three races, which will “follow” you in a module throughout the Election Results pages as you navigate the site.

Where can I find all the latest analysis from the CNN Political Unit?
The Best Political Team will offer reporting, analysis and live blogging on the Political Ticker, where you will also find the latest information on voter problems, key congressional races, voter turnout and the latest information on the campaign trail.

I am unsure how electoral votes work or what “balance of power” really means. Is there a place that explains these terms at a basic level?
The Electoral College process along with information on where and how to vote can be found in our Elections 101 section. In addition, a comprehensive glossary of elections terms takes the mystery out of some of our commonly used terms throughout the election site.

How can I find information about where candidates stand on a particular issue?
Simply go to our Issues section within the Election Center for information on how the presidential and vice presidential candidates would tackle the big issues currently facing our nation.

How can I find out more about the campaigns and how their strategies – campaign visits, ad spending, etc. - affected the Election?
Our comprehensive Election Tracker includes information on candidate polling, fundraising, ad spending, candidate visits and past results. You can also try the Power Play feature that lets you “mash up,” or compare, two categories to see the correlations.

Does CNN.com cover third party candidates?
CNN.com covers third party candidates throughout our results pages as they affect specific state races. At the national level, users will be able to track every vote for president on one page, at cnn.com/thirdparties.

Where can I share my views on this election?
CNN.com has several places where you can discuss the issues that matter to you. The Forum offers lively debate and discussion and allows you to build a badge that reflect your political beliefs, compare your views to others and — for Facebook users — connect and share with your friends. iReport.com is an entirely user-generated online destination that provides a place for you share the experiences you have had during this election. Here you can upload photos and videos to help tell your story, and you may even find that your coverage gets included on CNN! Finally, CNN.com selects several stories a day where users can “sound off” by submitting comments about a particular article or video.

Can I view election results on my mobile device?
CNN offers election results on your phone so you can get the latest numbers in the presidential, U.S. Senate, U.S. House and Governor races and also find races by your ZIP code. Just type cnn.com into your phone’s browser to get started.

What can I expect to see on CNN.com LIVE?
Expect to see all the excitement of the day and night on our live, multi-stream video news service. CNN.com Live will stream live reports from polling stations across the country, along with the analysis from guests, contributors and members of the Best Political Team on Television. As polls close, the CNN.com LIVE team will bring you real-time election results and analysis. We’ll also be streaming all the major acceptance and concession speeches. Catch highlights on VOD later if you missed anything.

No we’re not reliving our favorite Tom Cruise movie moments. But in this age of consumer empowerment, we want to do our part to help you navigate the tips and advice our correspondents are offering up in their daily reporting.

People contact us all the time asking us to share the major “takeaways” from our consumer reporting — especially when it comes to money and health matters. So we’re excited to announce the launch of our new consumer tips blog. (http://www.cnn.com/tips)

On the health front, Dr Sanjay Gupta, Elizabeth Cohen and Judy Fortin will be offering advice on how to stay healthy and take a more proactive role in your personal health care.

Personal Finance editor Gerri Willis will share her “top tips” on all things related to your money, from the 5 best ways to sell a home in a down market, to saving for college.

Senior Business Correspondent Ali Velshi will blog here as well, and prove that he is not the “hairless prophet of doom and gloom” as Jon Stewart calls him. Ali can’t help that he’s compelled to tell it like it is. His focus here will be to decode the latest economic news, with the top “takeways” you need to remain an informed consumer.

We know your time is valuable, so Ali, Gerri, Sanjay, Elizabeth and Judy promise to keep their tips short and sweet, with plenty of links to deeper content. In the future, we hope to expand this blog to include ‘top tips’ in other areas– possibly travel and technology.

Check it out starting today. Tell us what you think. Or as Jerry Maguire would say, “Help us help you.”

On Super Tuesday CNN.com collected user feedback through comment cards on our web site. We’ve used this feedback to improve our Elections coverage on the site and make it more useful and user friendly for our viewers. We hope you appreciate the changes and continue to come to CNN for the latest Election news and results. Below we’ve answered a few of the top questions puzzling some of our users along with answers. Got more questions? Send them to us through our blog and we’ll do our best to respond!

Your Questions:

Why are the names I saw on the ballot at my voting precinct different from the names on your results tables?
There may be fewer names displayed on our results tables than what you see on your ballot because CNN.com only displays those candidates considered editorially relevant by The Associated Press (AP) and Edison Media Research (EMR), which provide the results feed to CNN. Thus, there may be some candidates you see on your ballot that do not display on CNN because they are officially out of the race or are not considered editorially relevant. How CNN projects winners.

Some states don’t show 100% precincts reporting, even though the race happened a while ago. Why is that happening, and when will we see the rest of the results?
Some states spread their contests over several days, and the results feed from AP/EMR when they are reported by state or party officials. So partial results may remain on the results tables for some time. Once results are in we will display them on our tables.

Every few weeks a small group of us here at CNN.com get together for what we informally call an “Exchange Think” session. We’ll extract ourselves from the often frenetic pace of the newsroom, find a quiet corner, and share all the cool new things we’ve stumbled upon online, let each other know about new blogs, and just dream up fun ideas for the site.

Many of our discussions center around ways to enhance community on the CNN.com. For example, lately we find ourselves talking about pervasive newsgames, mash-up or green screen contests, meaningful CNN presence in online worlds, and other avenues for making user participation a compelling component of our storytelling. Building up a community on CNN.com is one of my personal passions. For our sessions, we also routinely bring in guests from across the newsroom so that we can hear about everyone’s own passionate projects.

For me, one of the best things about working at CNN.com is that we have the opportunity to take our blue sky ideas and make them reality. In addition to the many planned features that we’ll be rolling out continuously as part of the evolution of CNN.com, many of our “Exchange Think” ideas have also had an impact. For example, the CNN Exchange Flickr group, which feeds into I-Reports, is one of the great ideas that came out of an Exchange Think session. The I-Report blog is another.

Here are some of our favorite sites:

• Flickr
• Boing Boing
• BBC’s Backstage Blog
• Cool Hunting
• Information Aesthetics
• Smart Mobs

Do you have a great idea for us? We’d love to hear all about your ideas for newsgames, mash-up contests, or anything else that would get you excited about interacting with other CNN.com users and engaging with our stories. Let us know what content or resources we can provide to make your ideas viable, and we’ll be happy to explore it. Contact us with your ideas, share your clips or creations, or just let us know about links or initiatives that should be on our radar. We look forward to hearing from you!

As many of you have noted through our feedback forms, we also overhauled our weather system. One thing you told us loud and clear in our research for this project was that weather was important to everyone (in one way or another). We wanted to make sure that we were able to provide you with the most useful and meaningful weather experience possible.

Now, in addition to getting 10-day forecasts and a wide array of weather maps, you have the ability to save multiple locations soyou can see what the weather is like either where you’re going or where you’ve been. Once you save your weather location, you’ll see the current condition displayed on the homepage and at the top of every page. Now you can get your weather anywhere you go on the site.

We’ve also gotten a lot of feedback from you about things you’d like to see. We heard you. Here’s what you’ve asked for:

And we’re not done… we’ve still got a lot of new features and advancements coming to help improve our weather system.

As many of you know during the beta period - and now post-launch - we are soliciting your feedback through links on the site and through this blog. And your feedback has been invaluable to us as we continue to evolve the site. In addition to helping us shape our next features, fight bugs, and simply “telling it to us like it is,” these comments have also helped us take ourselves a little less seriously and acted as a source for some internal comic relief. I receive hourly updates on comments and while it’s not possible to read them all, I have read a lot of them. Below are some favorites, each with their own special award.

These are just a few of the diverse and always interesting comments we get through our feedback mechanisms. Thank you to everyone out there that has sent us feedback - we are and will continue to be listening!

Hello and welcome to the RELAUNCHED CNN.com! Our new site is the culmination of over a year of listening, researching, analyzing, and building a site to meet your needs. If there were an “easy button” for news, this is what you’d expect.

Thank you to everyone who visited our Beta version during the past few weeks and provided feedback. We’ve listened and made adjustments to reflect changes you recommended.

Our talented team of journalists, developers, designers, UI experts, researchers, project managers, engineers, and (simply) world-class problem solvers have come together to bring you this improved service. What will you find? First, the same laser-like focus on the news, particularly what’s happening now, that has made us the #1 news site online. Second, a cleaner, simplified interface that should make consuming the news an easy and enjoyable experience.

As you explore the site, you will find tons of great new features, including one-page integrated story-telling, the largest Flash video player of its kind, local coverage, better weather, blog links, commenting, and (coming Monday) free live video for breaking news.

Whether you like to scan headlines, seek perspective, dig into a topic or simply check out the most popular stories of the day, we’ve tried to create an experience that works for you.

For those of you just joining this conversation, check out our blog posts below. Take us for a test drive and let us know what you think by either commenting directly in this blog or clicking on the feedback links you’ll find throughout the site!

First and foremost, I want to personally thank you for being some of CNN.com’s best customers, fans and supporters. As Pipeline subscribers, you’ve done the rarity… signed up for a pay content service on the internet. I hope that you’ve found value in your 7 cent/day habit.

When we go free next week, I know some of you are going to be happy… and some not so happy. As a habitual, daily Pipeline addict, I will join you in going through withdrawal symptoms born of not having a commercial-free user experience. I will also miss my baby, the downloadable player, which allowed me to view all my videos in one place, pin the video to my desktop in mini mode, and browse/search videos. A ton of work and creative thought went into building the CNN Pipeline Player, and the team that built it and its many components must be commended for their vision and true innovation.

So, why are we changing to a new model and a new service? Couple of reasons. First, as popular as the service was, it became clear to us that reaching true scale was going to be impossible if the product remained a pay service. Remember that our entire mission is about getting more news to more people on more platforms… and too few people actually subscribed for us to meet that goal. Second, once we built our new flash video experience in the Integrated Story presentation on CNN.com, we realized that that was a better experience than even the Pipeline player for videos. There are no load times, no pop-up players, no changing software environment to worry about, and you can get more context for the story in an integrated way. In short, we could create a better news experience within CNN.com than on any other site, and once that includes free live Pipeline content, our new site will be a game changer.

Time will tell if we’re right. Rest assured that we will continue to innovate and make the video viewing experience on CNN.com (whether live or on-demand), the best in the world. Thank you again for being part of this community helping us to get there together.

A clear pattern of comments from our audience is emerging, and I’d like to update you on our progress. On the positive side, we’re hearing things like the new site is clean, easy to navigate, simple, and has great new features like local news/weather and flash video. On the “areas of improvement” (euphemism for you guys have screwed up), we’re hearing that the site is “too white,” doesn’t have enough news, is hard to read/scan, and the videos are really choppy and don’t work well in (earlier) versions of Firefox.

We’ve taken your positive and negative feedback to heart, so coming soon:

• More headlines and sortability by section types - in other words, more news!
• Enhanced scanability with more contrast and less white
• Improvements to video serving (lowering bit rate and calibrating player)

Keep the comments coming!

If I were to describe all the intricate technical details behind the new CNN.com, you’d probably fall asleep before you could hit the back button. Of course, those of us working at CNN.com would be jealous, because most of us have gotten very little sleep in recent months.

From a technology standpoint, the biggest shift in the new CNN.com is the inclusion of more dynamic services. You’ll notice the ability to personalize your weather in the global navigation at the top of this page and across the entire site. On the homepage, there’s an an additional area for your local forecast as well as headlines from your area. On story pages, there’s a “We Recommend” box in the lower right that offers related content from CNN.com and our partners tailored to the most recent stories you’ve read.

In the coming months, you’ll notice more features that further personalize your experience on CNN.com. So what’s interesting about all that? From the time CNN.com launched in 1995, it’s been mostly a “flat” site, meaning every user essentially got the same content. As you might expect, a site like CNN.com serves millions of users each day, and traffic can double or triple at a moment’s notice during breaking news. Everything we do from a technology standpoint must have the ability to scale effectively during those times. The ability to reliably serve traffic and manage bandwidth is a science in itself, and we’ve all read and heard about various web sites crashing under the weight of traffic. We’d rather report those stories rather than be the subject of them.

This is also the first time we’ve conducted an extensive beta, which is a little like trying to change your tire while driving a hundred miles an hour. Though challenging, we’ve learned a lot, especially via feedback from users. We’ve made several hundred fixes during the beta period and we have many more planned… so keep the comments coming!

Anyway, we’ve spent a good portion of the last year designing and building new systems to deliver a richer and more targeted experience for users whether you’re scanning headlines, watching video, checking the weather or reading the latest news. There’s been a large technology team devoted to this project, and it’s fair to say there are well over a hundred technologists involved and hundreds of thousands of lines of code that have been written over the course of many months. Once the new CNN.com rolls out, we’ll all be getting some much-needed sleep.