By Stephen Kaufman
Washington — As election officials across the United States are counting votes several hours after the polls close on November 6, news media outlets will already be reporting results and confidently declaring which states have been won by President Obama and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.
Despite the fact that a state’s election results are not official until all the votes are counted and the outcome is certified by a state official, usually the day after the election, news media could even declare that Obama or Romney has won the presidency while polls are still open in some western states.
To satisfy the public’s news appetite, American news organizations invest substantial resources to “call” (declare the winner of) states as soon as possible after the polls close, by surveying people who have just voted (“exit polls”), and increasingly by polling voters over the phone. In making their projections, the news outlets straddle a fine line between the endless competition to be the first to report the news and the desire to avoid errors and retractions.
NATIONAL ELECTION POOL PROVIDES COMMON DATA SOURCE
ABC News, the Associated Press (AP), CBS News, CNN, Fox News and NBC News created the National Election Pool (NEP) in 2003, the primary source of data behind media predictions on election night.
The organization relies on analysts from Edison Research to conduct and analyze exit polls and make projections.
According to Edison’s website, exit polls are administered only minutes after voters have cast their ballots, and along with recording how they voted, the data also provides details that can help analysts understand the motivations and patterns behind their votes, including age, education and other demographic information, and what issues the voters said concerned them.
The data cover not only the presidential vote, but also Senate and House races and important state ballot initiatives. Any news outlet can get the information, but access comes with a $33,000 price tag.
The NEP and Edison researchers plan to undertake more comprehensive polling in swing states, where they will try to get data journalists can use to draw narrative conclusions about the vote.
With many Americans having voted early, news media are also reaching out to poll voters by phone. They are also identifying precincts that reflect a state’s demographics to help predict how the state’s population voted as a whole.
On November 6, under the supervision of NEP member representatives, Edison analysts will assess the exit poll data, make predictions and provide all of their results to the subscribing networks beginning at 5 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, after being sequestered for most of the day to prevent any premature release of information.
Each network will then combine the NEP data with its own research and have its experts “call” each state’s contests once it feels confidently able to do so.
ELECTION 2000 IS A CAUTIONARY TALE
Journalists have learned that, despite the pressure to be competitive in a 24-hour news cycle, it is better to be correct than to be first. No U.S. election highlighted the pitfalls more effectively than the 2000 presidential contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore.
In that race, where the outcome in the state of Florida would ultimately decide the entire election, television viewers saw the state called for Gore shortly after the polls closed on the evening of November 7. That call was reversed and awarded to Bush a few hours later, and then finally the race in Florida was determined to be “too close to call” in the early morning hours of November 8.
The general public was not the only group suffering from electoral whiplash. According to University of Miami social scientist Joseph Uscinski, once the news media predicted Bush had won Florida, and therefore the presidency, that information “prompted” a telephoned concession call from Gore to Bush. The subsequent announcement that the outcome could not yet be determined led to Gore’s placing a second call to Bush to retract his concession. The winner ultimately was decided 35 days later by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
