Will the Networks Get It Right?

By Daren Fonda

Most of the time, media professionals wait for news to happen before reporting it. On election night, however, veteran journalists dispense with tradition and race to declare a winner before all the votes are counted, relying mainly on surveys of voters exiting the polls and partial tallies of ballots cast. The system worked pretty well until it blew up in 2000, when the networks called Florida for Al Gore, reversed themselves, and, well, you know the rest. So things will be different this time. Sure, the TV networks will be competing to declare America's next President. But restraint will prevail, the intense pressure to keep you from switching to a more exciting channel be damned.

Well, maybe. As soon as the polls close, the networks will still try to call as many contests as possible, but they will be relying on a new system. The old organization that conducted exit polls and counted votes for the networks, Voter News Service (VNS), has been dissolved and replaced by the National Election Pool (NEP), a consortium of six news outlets: ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News and the Associated Press. Veteran pollster Warren Mitofsky led a group that overhauled VNS's computer models, factoring in, for instance, voting patterns from three previous elections instead of one. Mitofsky and Edison Media Research will conduct exit polls, and the A.P. will tally votes. The networks are also using more sophisticated statistical models to interpret the data, each with its own special sauce to try to project winners as fast and accurately as possible. Overall, the system held up during the Democratic primary and has been tweaked and stress tested since then.

One area where NEP should be more accurate is in measuring the impact of absentee ballots. In 2000, roughly 16% of the electorate voted absentee or early, and that figure could hit 22% this year, according to Mitofsky, since many states have loosened restrictions on voting by mail. Because absentee and early voters aren't represented in exit polls, NEP is surveying those voters by phone in 13 states, up from three states in 2000.

Still, states have a hodgepodge of rules for counting absentee ballots. Edison and Mitofsky sent a memo to analysts in September, warning that dealing with the absentee vote "is a very, very tricky business." In Missouri and Ohio, some counties include mail-in votes in their precinct tabulations and some don't. In certain states, the memo concluded, "as much as 15% to 30% of the total vote may not be counted on election night even when nearly 100% of all precincts have reported."

Network executives insist there won't be a repeat of the 2000 debacle. "We're all agreed that the race is to be right, not first," says NBC News vice president Bill Wheatley. NBC will prevent analysts on its "decision desk," who will sift through the NEP data, from knowing the calls made by other networks. ABC News has a new policy of not calling a winner if the margin is less than 1%, even after all precincts have reported. CBS has moved its decision desk into the studio to give viewers a window into the process. "We'll be trying to explain very clearly where our information comes from, that it's not someone standing over a crystal ball and going 'poof,'" says Kathleen Frankovic, director of surveys for CBS News. Stay tuned for a long night. --By Daren Fonda