Faced with a results vacuum that may last for weeks, US TV networks are preparing to fill the airwaves amid unprecedented pressure to avoid mistakes and a flood of misinformation.
In 2020, President Joe Biden’s triumph was revealed after four suspenseful days.
This year, experts and spectators will be waiting for the jigsaw piece of states to be proclaimed for Democrats or Republicans one by one, along with their electoral college votes, which must reach 270 to win.
“It’s all going to come down to seven really competitive swing states, and in a lot of those states, we’re not going to have sufficient data to make a projection until either late that evening, early the next day, or in some cases, it might be days after the election,” said Joe Lenski, executive vice president of Edison Research.
His organization will produce exit polls, projections and vote counts for the ABC, CBS, NBC News and CNN networks.
In addition to the complex electoral system, voting and counting methods vary by location.
Lenski cites Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, two critical swing states that do not begin counting early votes until Election Day, November 5.
With no official results in weeks, it is up to the television networks to call states for either former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris.
Behind the opulent TV studios, the real strain will be on the network decision desks, teams of statisticians and analysts who will provide anchors with projections based on the uneven early results.
‘Tremendous Pressure’
“The stakes are very high… there is tremendous pressure to capture viewers by giving them information as quickly as it is available, but the greatest risk is sacrificing accuracy for speed,” said Costas Panagopoulos, a political science professor at Northeastern University and former member of the NBC decision desk.
On November 3, 2020, just a few hours after the polls closed, America’s most popular conservative channel Fox News struck a body blow to Trump’s chances by calling Arizona for Biden.
The announcement, confirmed several days later by other media, infuriated the Trump camp.
Maybe most notorious was the U-turn networks made in 2000 after Florida was prematurely called for Democratic contender Al Gore.
To avoid a repeat of the credibility-damaging episode, media are relying on more advanced analytics that will use not just exit polls but also surveys of early voters.
‘Political Posturing’
Election lawyer Ben Ginsberg said he expected the “red mirage” of 2020, the apparent Republican lead that ebbed away as mail-in ballots popular with Democrats were added to tallies.
“(What’s) still unclear is whether a Republican push this year to have their voters cast ballots early will change this pattern,” Ginsberg added in an editorial in The New York Times.
During the lengthy sprint to a result, networks will strive to keep their audiences while maintaining accuracy and transparency in the face of an expected tidal flood of misinformation regarding alleged electoral fraud.
CNN will reintroduce its “magic wall,” which allows chief national reporter John King to visually depict trends and demonstrate his encyclopedic knowledge of previous elections.
NBC News has provided many pieces describing in detail how data will be collected from over 100,000 polling sites beginning November 5.
They have also detailed the precautions that will be taken to accurately project the results of 610 polls, including elections to the Senate and the House of Representatives.
“The amount of data that our partner news organizations provide their viewers… is more data than (has) ever been provided before. There’s more detail, there’s more maps, there’s more analysis than ever,” said Lenski.
“Delays themselves are not evidence of a conspiracy,” Ginsberg wrote in his column.
“If either candidate jumps the gun and declares victory before the votes are counted, dismiss it as political posturing.”