As I write this, it's just after midnight Tuesday evening. While this isn't a major election night, there were some significant races to watch. So presumably even at this late hour, viewers might think that tuning into one of the cable news networks is the easiest and most accurate place to find the latest election results.

Instead, viewers will find themselves confronted with a series of deja-vu experiences, as the three major cable news networks seem to have opted for reairing programming from earlier in the evening.

So even though it's past 1:00 am ET, viewers of MSNBC are faced with a rerun of Lawrence O'Donnell discussing what might happen if the Republicans win the governor's race in New Jersey. Oh, the network updated the graphics and newscrawl to reflect the current results, but that makes the oddness of the presentation even more jarring.

The coverage isn't any fresher on CNN, which is reairing an earlier edition of "360 With Anderson Cooper." So while his guests are discussing the possibility of events that by now have already taken place, the news crawl paints a more accurate picture.

As for Fox News Channel....well, I watched for nearly a half hour, and while I'm pretty sure the coverage is from earlier in the evening, the network did a better job of hiding old graphics and conversations. There was coverage of a speech which I'm pretty sure took place at least three hours ago. But much of the political discussion was general enough that it was tough to place an accurate timestamp on it.

And frankly, all of these cable news outlets should be ashamed. I know that they want to have their "stars" front and center throughout the early morning hours. But all three networks have adequate news gathering capabilities even in the off-hours. As a viewer, I would much rather see someone sitting a desk reading copy that is current. As opposed to playing "guess what time it was when Chris Matthews or David Gergen said that."

What an all-around sad performance by everyone involved.