Without using any advanced obfuscation techniques that might make this smaller...

use LWP::Simple;$_=get('http://www.cnn.com');($P,$u,$l)=m~(Bush|Gore)<
+/\S+\s*<td\s*\S+ \S+edhead">([\d,]{9}).*?([\d,]{9})~s;$u=~s/,//g;$l=~
+s/,//g;$d=$u-$l;print$d?"$P leads by $d votes!\n":"Tie!\n";
[download]

Update: This does everything requested, and can be made smaller by taking out white space (~25 bytes) (I followed Chromatic's example by keeping it in there) and/or removing the dependency on 'use strict' (~25 more bytes). :) 571 bytes.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use LWP::Simple;
use Mail::Mailer;

my($P,$u,$l)= get('http://www.cnn.com')=~
        m~(Bush|Gore)</\S+\s*<td\s*\S+ \S+edhead">([\d,]{9}).*?([\d,]{
+9})~s;

$u=~s/,//g;
$l=~s/,//g;
my $d=$u-$l;

print $d?"$P is leading by $d votes\n":"It's a tie!\n";

open(F,(-f'votes'?"+<":">")."votes");
my @v=<F>;
chomp(@v);

if ((split(/\t/,$v[-1]))[2]!=$d) {
        print F localtime()."\t$P\t$d\n";
        open(F,"<emails");
        chomp(@v=<F>);
        $l = new Mail::Mailer;
        $l->open({To=>join(",",@v)});
        print $l $d?"$P is leading by $d votes\n":"It's a tie!\n";
        $l->close;
}
[download]

Put a list of users/email addresses (comma-separated or line-separated) in 'emails' and run. It will report the current winner and the margin of votes and if this is different from last time, it will send an e-mail to everyone with the new information. Keeps a log of each change in 'votes'.

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.