Call It! Or Not. The Election Night Dilemma

This is the beauty of living in the mnt time zone, our TV times may get pretty wacky but if Obama takes FL or VA this thing could be over by the time i get home from work. Which is pretty awsome. Suck it East Coasters!
Oh and uh, i kinda like that they wait until polls close, basically for the Heisenberg reason. The projections they use are based on math that takes turn out into consideration but when they "call" a race that'll surelly effect turn out which would then change the math they used to make the "call." Just seems better for everyone if they wait IMO.

I am strongly opposed to announcing any election results, even exit polls, until (at least) all contiguous states have closed.

Then again, I also think a far more rational system would be to have election day be a national holiday, have the polls open from say, 8 to 5, and have the matter resolved at a reasonable hour. But what do I know...

And to everyone complaining about wordpress names (which includes half the official posters):
Log in on some comment page.
Click on your name above the comment box.
Click on "Your Dashboard" in the upper left.
Click on "Profile" in the upper right.
Create "Nickname" with civilized spelling/capitalization/etc.
Hit "Update Profile".
Go back into the profile and select for "Display name publicly as" your far more elegant Nickname.
Limit your WP complaints to lack of embedded video.

Canada's put the Heisenberg principle into law. The Elections Act makes it illegal to report on results where balloting has closed in areas where they're still open (they also stagger voting hours across the country to minimize the differences). The federal election a couple of weeks ago saw some violations, but they all seemed to be accidents (no, really).

I live in the time zone where voting ends last, and while I understand it might make it less likely for people to vote if they know the election's already been pretty much decided by our eastern brethren, I sure as hell checked to find out that they'd called it before our polls closed ("Internet publishers" are included in the language of the law, but good luck controlling the blogosphere). I also voted in the morning so I felt less irrelevant.

"I don't think that TV networks, or any journalism organizations, should make their decisions on the basis of promoting behaviors they consider to be civically righteous"

How about making decisions that are themselves civically righteous?

Oh wait, I forgot, this is the media we're talking about, the phantom "right to know" outweighs everything else - like privacy, order, and people's lives.

And you wonder why people have such a low opinion of your hobby

The media should not declare a winner in a state where the polls have not closed yet. The media should not declare a winner nationally until the candidate has been declared the winner in enough states with closed polls to make up the necessary number of electorates.
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The whole "if we don't start calling the election early, then the bloggers will do it for us and we'll lose the glory" thing just doesn't work for me.
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Yes, voters have the responsibility to get out and vote. But that doesn't mean that journalists don't also have a responsibility of honest and informed reporting.

After 2000 I wish The Media (so ominous...) would just leave all the exit polling and crap alone for however long it takes to actually count votes. Wait for the states to declare winners and be done with it.

Thanks Tom, although now my wordpress login seems pretty asinine, and long.

I also owe a kudos to Tom, although Carlos, i still agree with your assessment of wordpress in your original name.

James I gotta go with the whole Heisenberg principle thing here, you wait until the polls close then you announce the results. You make an interesting argument that holding back information is just as bad as announcing it but there is a difference. See because the "information" that they would have before the polls close is not really truth to report but their estimate. Unfortunately when they call a state for a candidate, even though they say its an estimate, the public will take it as a fact. Therefore they've affected the race by essentially stating as fact, something that is not a fact. On the flip side, if their models show that someone is going to win a state but they do not release that information, they are not holding back any "facts" just holding back their own estimates, which I would say is not as bad an offense. That probably doesn't make much sense, but it did in my head. Basically I think there's a dissonance between what they know, and how the public interprets this "knowledge" once the media reports it.

A post that Colbert would be proud of since I just put quotes around the words facts and knowledge. I'm so truthy!

[...] by jponiewozik | Comments (0) | Permalink | Trackbacks (0) | Email This I wrote earlier that it's been network policy not to call elections before the polls close. But there's calling and then there's calling. [...]

[...] wrote earlier that it’s been network policy not to call elections before the polls close. But there’s calling and then there’s [...]

I'd like to see a national holiday for election day, and all the polls open for the same 24-hour period. They all open at the same time and they all close at the same time. And then we wait...