Election Night: How it Works

Both when I was a young reporter, and later on when I was a news director, managing editor, or bureau chief, election nights were always the highlights of the year. Originally, we followed the results via an almost continuous series of updates from the Associated Press, coming across those old ticker machines with bells.

An intern would tear off the latest numbers report and rush it over to the news director, who would hand it off to the relevant reporter. In radio, we’d prepare an update reading straight from the AP results, often improvising our analysis, and patch in a bit of sound tape from the field if we had any.

Reporters were busy on the phones interviewing winners and losers, the sponsors of initiatives and the various community leaders who had been active on this particular issue, or in that particular end of town, and also, of course, “experts.” Other correspondents were in the field, where we’d switch over to them speaking from Registrar’s offices or campaign headquarters.

Today, decades later, despite all the changes that have engulfed and even overwhelmed the media industry, the encitement of election night remains unchallenged as is appropriate for the biggest night of the year for political news junkies.

Every company covering the Presidential election is seeing huge traffic spikes right  now — from The New York Times to Politico.com. The largest website in the world (in traffic) – Yahoo — is preparing an expanded server capacity to avoid any election night meltdowns.

But, one key feature of the process remains the same — the role of the A.P. The news service is the official disseminator of election results for all major media companies. The A.P. gathers the vote tabulations directly from the city, county and state authorities and circulates them immediately to all of its member clients.

The A.P. bureau chiefs in each state or region typically make the call, when enough votes have been counted, and the margin is large enough, to safely declare a winner.

Meanwhile, the largest media organizations have been busily stockpiling demographic data, voter registration information, early voting totals, historical voting patterns and any other data that can help interpret the patterns emerging before winners can be declared.

Probably the best example of how this material is crunched and communicated is over at CNN, which though I often mock for its presentation styles, has one true stalwart in John King and his “magic map.” King’s one of the best political reporters around and he has spent a lot of effort breaking down the districts and pockets in states that can serve as early indicators of what the eventual results may be.

Given the changing business models in media, it is not clear how many more election cycles will still be anchored by the A.P. But at least in it will be again in 2008, as it has been throughout my career.