VOICES
Voter News Service: R.I.P.
But it's not clear that the networks have learned their lesson
Don't speak ill of the dead," my mother used to say. Still, I cheered last January at the demise of the Voter News Service, terminated by its owners ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, and AP. VNS had messed up tallying the nation's voting results two election nights in a row. It deserved to die. Others cheered because they bitterly resent, and have never understood, the networks' persistence in projecting winners while people in many states are still lining up to vote.
The VNS failure in November 2002 meant the networks' election night coverage was limited largely to reporting the actual votes tallied, without the benefit of sample precinct exit polls that provide specific data about who voted for whom and why. Exit polls and key precinct tallies not only enable the networks to call elections early. They also provide essential information to journalists, political scientists, politicians, and ordinary citizens about how the vote went by income, sex, race, ethnicity, and education, and they help us understand why voters voted the way they did.
Members of Congress, especially from western states, hate early election projections and have held numerous hearings to complain about them. In 1984, Congress even passed a blunderbuss concurrent resolution calling for "broadcasters and other members of the news media [to] refrain from characterizing or projecting results of an election before all polls for the office have closed," something no news medium would, could, or should ever do. Imagine the futility, in this Internet era, of not reporting already released eastern states' election results until California, three hours away, Alaska, four hours away, and Hawaii, five hours away, finish voting. The news would never keep.
The ten-year-old Voter News Service died because in 2000 its faulty data caused the networks to call the Bush-Gore election wrong twice in one night, and in 2002 VNS's expensive new computer software and delivery system, installed to correct the earlier debacle, failed altogether. According to a former VNS managing director, Robert Flaherty, who resigned in 1997, "as early as 1996 the networks had plenty of notice that the vote collection agency was not up to the task, but they refused to put up the money to fix it. It was like watching an old person die. The systems were deteriorating, equipment was getting old, and software was outdated."
In 2002 VNS at least had the grace to warn its owners of the system's collapse before election night coverage began. That was not the case in 1964, when I was in charge of advertising at NBC. NBC spent millions to promote its high-tech election night coverage featuring extensive use of computers for the first time. We promised to deliver the fastest vote totals ever, thanks to a battery of brand new, state-of-the-art RCA mainframe computers. Anchors Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, and their colleagues in New York's Studio 8H were surrounded by a Potemkin space-age election set although the actual computers were miles away in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Unfortunately, when the vote tallies started pouring in, the highly touted RCA computers gave up the ghost. As a fail-safe measure, however, the Luddite skeptics at NBC News had the foresight to back up the newfangled computers with a low-tech army of corporate bookkeepers equipped with desktop adding machines. The old-fashioned system worked fine, and no one outside of Studio 8H was ever the wiser.
In those days, a jointly owned group called the News Election Service stationed scouts and members of civic and church groups at thousands of vote counting sites throughout the nation and in about 100,000 precincts, to collect the returns and feed them to the networks and other news media. For its election projections, each network would also analyze returns using its own sample precincts and exit polls, conducted under the watchful eyes of a hired pride — eminent social scientists, retired census officials, and polling specialists. With so many competing data sources, there were plenty of checks and balances to keep the projections accurate. Testifying as the new president of NBC News before a hostile Senate committee in August 1984, I pointed out that in the twenty years that NBC News had been projecting the outcome of presidential elections in every state, it had never been wrong.
Then came changes of network ownership and a new era of TV news belt-tightening and unprecedented profit demands. The conglomerate owners ordered heavy cuts in news budgets, and the networks decided they could save money by becoming partners instead of competitors in gathering exit poll data. With the AP, they formed the Voter News Service in 1993 to do all vote tallying and exit polling. That single-source system's embarrassing recent failures demonstrate the danger of pooling major newsgathering efforts. If the news pool gets it wrong, there's no backup.
The Iowa caucus next January 19, kicking off the 2004 presidential election, is less than a year away. To save money, the networks will once again join forces to tally votes for the primaries, caucuses, and elections. This time, they've contracted with two firms, headed by the former CBS News election polling veterans Warren Mitofsky and Joseph Lenski, to work together to conduct exit polls and supply data from a single set of sample precincts for all the networks' projections. The AP will collect the actual nationwide vote totals. The whole effort will cost approximately ten million dollars, offset by payments from newspaper and station clients for use of the election data. Each network will pay less for its election data than the cost of a second-tier news anchor, hardly a major financial burden given the extra billion dollars or so that television will rake in from the rising tide of campaign commercials.
Mitofsky and Lenski are no doubt confident that they can do the job. Others say they're not so sure, citing the very short time frame, new election day complications such as the growing trend toward mail balloting and people's increasing tendency to mislead pollsters or refuse to be polled, and the recent history of vote-tallying failures. One problem already causing angst among some insiders is each network's insistence that its own election night decision desk project the winners, even though all will be operating from exactly the same information supplied by the same source. As one news executive said, "that puts a strain on our election desk to be first to make a call, not last." After the embarrassment of the last two times out, however, the hope is that restraint will be shown.
My advice to the networks: On election night 2004, vote a split ticket — against early projections based primarily on exit polls; for projections based primarily on actual vote returns.
Enjoy this piece? Consider a CJR trial subscription.
