The definitive answer on whether including cell-phone-only voters improved polls’ accuracy during this election cycle:  Sort of.

It looks like polls that included cell phones came closer to the true Obama vote share (but were farther from the true McCain share).  However, of the four polls that came closest to the true numbers, three were traditional and one included cell phones.

See pollster.com for graphs and further explanation.

Nate Silver has your hour-by-hour guide to election night.

Tomorrow, Barack Obama will become the first Democratic Presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter in 1976 to win an outright majority of the votes cast on Election Day — and with it a sizeable majority of electoral votes — making him the next President of the United States.

We make this projection knowing that the gap is closing both nationally and in key states; it is our sense, however, that this trend would have to continue for another 10 days for the election to swing back to McCain.

Read their rationale here.

From First Read: The latest on the state of the game in the swing states.

Also, Pollster.com suggests that a large number of cell phone-only households could explain why recent Virginia numbers have been over the place.  If that’s true, then the polls showing Obama in the lead are probably more accurate.

A few points on the post-convention bounces for Obama and McCain, from Pollster.com. I’m trying not to panic despite the good news for McCain.  Palin just had a killer night and came off as not only tough but personable.  Once voters get to know her policy positions, and hear more about all those scandals in Alaska, that bounce will fade.

One note on the CBS poll: I heard John Zogby say on the Diane Rehm show that CBS buries their “horse race” question (i.e., who do you plan to vote for?) in the middle of their survey.  That sort of thing can prime respondents one way or another, depending on the preceding questions, and is almost never done because it can bias the results.  He didn’t have any explanation for why CBS does this, but it’s worth keeping in mind if their numbers ever seem out of line with other polls.