Two local precincts tracked Asian-American voters in Nov.

When voting results are divided by demographic group, typically the options are Caucasian, African-American, Latino and other.

That's not much help if you're Asian-American and want to know the voting patterns of people like yourself.

For two local precincts in the 2008 presidential election, Asian-American voters had their own exit poll for the first time. Deep Run High School in Henrico County and Midlothian High School in Chesterfield County were part of a national project conducted by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, with help here from the Asian American Society of Central Virginia.

Glenn D. Magpantay, the national group's staff attorney, talked about the results last week at a meeting of the Asian American Society at the Tuckahoe Library.

In Virginia, 16,665 Asian-American voters participated in the multilingual exit poll at precincts in Northern Virginia and Virginia Beach, as well as central Virginia.

The five largest ethnic groups surveyed were Korean (22 percent), Vietnamese (20 percent), Asian Indian (15 percent), Chinese (13 percent) and Filipino (9 percent). Almost a third were first-time voters.

Two-thirds of the Asian vote across the country went to Democratic candidate Barack Obama, Magpantay said. Among first-time Asian voters, Obama got 81 percent. The one group of first-time Asian voters supporting John McCain, the Republican, was Vietnamese-Americans.

At the Deep Run precinct, Obama got 70 percent of the Asian vote; in Midlothian, he got 54 percent.

In Virginia, neither political party could claim a majority of Asian-American voters, with 42 percent identified as Democrats and 35 percent as Republicans. Nationally, 58 percent were Democrats.

In a letter to the Virginia State Board of Elections and local boards where exit polling was done, Magpantay outlined the organization's observations. "In an election with historic voter totals across the country, we congratulate you and your employees and volunteers whose hard work led to an overwhelmingly incident-free day," he began.

Most of the problems involved voters with limited English not being able to get assistance in their language. In Northern Virginia precincts, 57 voters reported that they needed an interpreter, and 64 voters said they needed information in their language, but neither was available.

In the Richmond region, two Asian-American voters at Deep Run complained that their names or addresses were missing from or appeared incorrectly on the voter lists.

Contact Katherine Calos at (804) 649-6433 or .