Prepare for Election Day with your iPhone

Here at the TUAW home office, we're quite distracted by the pending election of the USA's 44th President. However, since this is an Apple blog, we can't go all political -- but we can combine our interests.

Here are four ways you can prepare for the big day with your iPhone.

1. Quiz yourself about the candidates

How well do know the man who'll receive you vote? Fit 2 Vote [App Store link] displays a quote made by either John McCain or Barack Obama. Your job is to identify the quote's origin. Once you've correctly attributed 50 quotes, you're deemed "fit to vote." Fit 2 Vote costs $0.99US.

2. Report on your polling place

Vote Report [App Store link] is the mobile end of the Twitter Vote Report, a network of software developers, designers, and others that allows voters to instantly share the conditions at their polling places. Use your iPhone to alert the media, your neighbors, friends or anyone involved about wait times, machine malfunctions, and especially clever signs in the parking lot. Vote Report is free.

[Incidentally, has anyone ever, in the history of democracy, been swayed by a posterboard sign viewed minutes before voting? You've got to wonder why those people are standing out there in the rain.]

3. Track live results

By now the rhetoric has nearly died down and all that's left is the results. Election [App Store link] provides real-time polling results that can be sorted by state, candidate, percentage and more. You can even limit the results to your candidate, and best of all, there's no stumping. Election only reports the numbers. Election costs $0.99US.

4. Perform electoral math

Votetastic [App Store link] lets you fiddle with electoral votes and observe the results. For instance, you can select a contested state like Ohio and either turn it "red" or "blue." Doing so moves those electoral votes from one side to the other.

Votetastic is really more of a game than a tool, as it doesn't report on real data, but it could be fun to see if your own predictions come true. Votetastic costs $0.99US