AP
New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, left, and Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning shake hands after their AFC divisional playoff game at Gillette Stadium, in this Jan. 16, 2005 file photo, in Foxborough, Mass. The Patriots won, 20-3.

Football today: While we putter in anticipation of tonight's 8:30 p.m. Patriots-Colts showdown on NBC from Gillette (where the dome team will play in temperatures forecast to be mid-30s), there are other games today:

1 p.m.:
Dallas Cowboys at Washington Redskins, Fox
Houston Texans at New York Giants, CBS

4 p.m.: Denver Broncos at Pittsburgh Steelers, CBS

But the big event is tonight. Keep Peyton shivering on the bench, don't give him time to set when he's out there, run a lot.

From the Indy Star: At How The Star's writers see it: Four-way split, all by three or four points.

Excerpts from the reader interactive segment on IndyStar.com/Colts: Average predicted score: Patriots 31 Colts 26 (Seventy-five percent said Patriots would win.)

Details at the Indy fans' discussion boards there:

Colts-Patriots: Who will win?
Predict the score
Predict the headline

No fancy recipes at our house this time; for the big one, we're grilling rib-eyes.

Exit polls: Exit poll analysts going to great lengths to get it right 'They'll be sequestered to prevent early leaks that can cost credibility.' Matea Gold of the L.A. Times writes,

...This time around, the members of the National Election Pool — a consortium of five broadcast and cable networks and The Associated Press that commissions exit polls of the major races — have decided to sequester two analysts from each news organization in a secret "quarantine room" in New York, where they alone will get access to the first waves of data from precincts around the country.

Stripped of their cellphones and BlackBerrys — and even monitored when they use the bathrooms — the representatives will be able to study the results of the surveys but will not be allowed to communicate them to their newsrooms until 5 p.m. EST, although results won't be broadcast until later. Projections will be made for each race in a state, one at a time, after all the polls in a state are closed.

The National Election Pool consists of ABC, The Associated Press, CBS, CNN, Fox News and NBC.

The election-pool representatives must sign legal affidavits guaranteeing they will not reveal any data before 5 p.m.

The measures are necessary, news executives said, to prevent the leaks that occurred in the 2004 presidential race, when early exit-poll results indicating Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry was in the lead rocketed through cyberspace....

With deep suspicion of how easily computer voting machines could be programmed to spit out a predetermined result, some tech-savvy Democrats insist those results were accurate, and that sly number-changing slipped past a generally clueless press corps and electorate. The winners of 2000 and 2004, as you might expect, think this is hogwash.

Just as only landline owners -- who tend to be older -- can be telephoned by pollsters, early voters (in states that permit that) can't be exit-polled.

Fascinating background: Rage against the machine Diebold struggles to bounce back from the controversy surrounding its voting machines. Barney Gimbel of Fortune does an in-depth piece on the 147-year-old company once headed by crimefighter Elliot Ness.

Here's a five-step plan guaranteed to make an obscure company absolutely notorious.

First get into a business you don't understand, selling to customers who barely understand it either. Then roll out your product without adequate testing. Don't hire enough skilled people. When people notice problems, deny, obfuscate and ignore. Finally, blame your critics when it all blows up in your face.

With missteps like those, it would be hard to succeed in the gumball business. But when your product is the hardware and software of democracy itself, that kind of performance gets you called not just incompetent but evil - an enemy of democracy. And that is what has happened to Diebold Inc. (Charts) of Canton, Ohio, since it got into the elections business in 2001.

The move seemed like a good idea at the time...

Now the company has ordered its nameplate removed from the front of its voting machines, Gimbel reports, suggesting it may be getting out of the kitchen. The photo above is of the Diebold AccuVote-TSX voting machine.

Bonus links:

Time: Can This Machine Be Trusted? "The U.S.'s new voting systems are only as good as the people who program and use them. Which is why next week could be interesting"

Wall Street Journal: Can Electronic Voting Be Trusted?

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Computerized vote systems raise fears of potential fraud

Belly busters: We haven't yet seen Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, but last night we watched HBO's retrospective of Da Ali G Show, the British TV show that made Borat's creator and several alter egos a hit. (You can catch all 12 episodesagain Monday, November 6 (8 episodes, 9 p.m.-1 a.m.), and Tuesday (4 episodes, 8-10 p.m.).

British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen is a Cambridge graduate, but Ali G is a hip-hop journalist from Kazakhstan, asking Americans hilariously incorrect questions about our country which most earnestly try to answer. Along the way, a variety of politicians and celebrities appear on his talk show, apparently unaware he's a comic and not sure how to respond to his outrageous questions. Laugh-out-loud funny, but not for tender ears.

Clips at YouTube. The Pat Buchanan clips are special.