In Place of Many, One

The presidential election of 2004 was, in electoral votes, the third closest since Rutherford B. Hayes. News Election Pool (NEP), a combine of five television networks and the country's leading wire service, spent a reported ten million dollars exit-polling voters, generating estimates from early models of the vote, and finally tabulating all 116 million of them. But on election night and well into the following morning, none of them ventured to report an outcome. One network executive, reflecting on the embarrassments of 2000 when all the networks put their reputations on the line and lost not once but twice, had declared beforehand that this time there would be among them “a race to be last.”

Unlike the presidential race, that one turned out to be a six-way tie. None of the members of the pool dared to recognize a winner until the loser himself called President Bush and, since no one else would do it, acknowledged that he had won.

In spite of that, nearly twenty-four hours earlier there was one place, in fact a bunch of places, abuzz with word that one candidate—the wrong one, it turned out—was on the march. On the internet you could take your pick of bloggers posting numbers ostensibly hot off the computer screens of the mostly tongue-tied networks. By mid-afternoon there was said to be panic in the Bush camp and joy in Kerryland.

Out of all that came complaints once again that the networks, for all their caution and their success in what counted most to them—making no mistakes—had somehow once again blown it. How did election night reporting come to this pass, and what can be done to ease the pain for next time? Here's a try at answering both questions.