At least one broadcast network and one Web site said Monday that they could foresee signaling to viewers early Tuesday evening which candidate appeared to have won the presidency, despite the unreliability of some early exit polls in the last presidential election.þþA senior vice president of CBS News, Paul Friedman, said the prospects for Barack Obama or John McCain meeting the minimum threshold of electoral votes could be clear as soon as 8 p.m. — before polls in even New York and Rhode Island close, let alone those in Texas and California. At such a moment, determined from a combination of polling data and samples of actual votes, the network could share its preliminary projection with viewers, Mr. Friedman said.þþ“We could know Virginia at 7,” he said. “We could know Indiana before 8. We could know Florida at 8. We could know Pennsylvania at 8. We could know the whole story of the election with those results. We can’t be in this position of hiding our heads in the sand when the story is obvious.”þþSimilarly, the editor of the Web site Slate, David Plotz, said in an e-mail message that “if Obama is winning heavily,” he could see calling the race “sometime between 8 and 9.” þþ“Our readers are not stupid, and we shouldn’t engage in a weird Kabuki drama that pretends McCain could win California and thus the presidency,” Mr. Plotz wrote. “We will call it when a sensible person — not a TV news anchor who has to engage in a silly pretense about West Coast voters — would call it.”þþAll the networks (and other news organizations with their own Web sites) were engaging in similar debates on Monday about striking the following balance: not relying too much on early exit poll data — which had suggested, at least early on Election Day in 2004, that Senator John Kerry might be on track to defeat President Bush — while not being so cautious as to be beaten to the punch by a competitor who announces an emerging result first. þþWhen asked how Katie Couric, who is leading CBS’s coverage, might present the network’s projection to viewers, Mr. Friedman said he could imagine her saying, for example, “Given what we know about the results, or the projected results in various states, it’s beginning to look like it will be very difficult for John McCain to put together enough votes to win this election.”þþThe decision desk director of ABC News, Dan Merkle, said, “I think at ABC we’re going to be more cautious than that, in terms of telegraphing which way the election is going.” Mr. Merkle said he was particularly concerned about how much stock to put in exit polls, “which are sometimes fine, and which sometimes have had overstatements on Democratic candidates in particular.”þþ“We may have some indications from that data,” Mr. Merkle said. “That’s different than going on the air to report that.”þþWith some national polls suggesting that Mr. Obama was heading for a potential electoral landslide, news organizations were preparing for a race that could be far less close than those in 2004 or 2000. The nearest precedent could be 1980, when the networks projected Ronald Reagan to have defeated Jimmy Carter shortly after the polls closed in the East. Later, the secretaries of state from Washington, Oregon and other Western states argued that, as a result of the networks’ early call that year, voter turnout in California dropped by about 2 percent.þþOther experts, though, have argued that any impact by the networks on turnout was far outweighed by Mr. Carter’s having made a concession speech shortly after the networks broadcast their results.þþWhatever the networks decide, it seemed clear that they would disregard a plea by Representative John D. Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, to hold off projecting a winner until polls in the last state had closed. Those would be Alaska’s, which are to remain open until 1 a.m. on the East Coast.þþ“When a candidate gets 270 electoral votes, they’re the next president,” said Sheldon Gawiser, director of elections for NBC News. “If some states are still voting, it’s an unfortunate circumstance, that’s what it is. The founding fathers never expected us to count the votes fast.”þþIn something of a compromise, CNN said it might tell its viewers that another news organization had called a particular state, but that it was holding off, and for what reason. þþIn 2004, early exit poll data suggested that Mr. Kerry was ahead began circulating within newsrooms — and leaking out on Web sites, including Slate’s — early in the afternoon on Election Day. This year, the consortium of six news organizations gathering the exit poll data — NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, CNN and The Associated Press — have agreed to keep the information under quarantine until 5 p.m.þþRepresentatives of those news organizations will begin analyzing that information at a secret location beginning in late morning, but will have to surrender all electronic devices at the door; even restroom visits will be supervised. There were already signs on Monday that the additional security was paying off.þþ“We won’t call off exit polls,” Mr. Plotz said, “in part because we don’t expect to get them leaked to us much before the first results.”þþ
Source: NY Times
