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11/03/06
Excerpts
from the chapter on Elections, by Tom Jory, in the upcoming
book:
Breaking News:
How the
Associated Press Has Covered War, Peace, and Everything Else
To be released in June 2007 by Princeton Architectural
Press
…The election on November 7, 1848, was the first in
which all states voted on the same day, and the first in which
the telegraph was used to gather returns from all over the
country. Dr. Alexander Jones, educated in medicine but drawn
to journalism and AP’s first general agent, brought
that election and the telegraph together to collect results
from the 30 states that voted then. The count went on for
seventy-two hours, and telegraph tolls exceeded $1,000, an
enormous sum in those days.
…Over the years, AP used every available means to secure
reliable returns. On December 11, 1860, the New York Times
carried a dispatch from Fort Kearney, Nebraska, reporting
that “the California Pony Express passed here at 5 o’clock
this morning and left the following to be telegraphed to the
Associated Press.” Included were full election returns
from every county in California, showing Lincoln with 38,702
votes and Douglas with 8,060.
…In December 1892, the Associated Press was incorporated
in Illinois, combining once and for all the New York AP and
the Western Associated Press. Melville E. Stone, who had been
editor of the Chicago Daily News, became general manager of
the new association. Over the next three presidential elections,
AP gradually set up its own vote-counting machinery and called
more and more on its own staff and member newspapers to provide
results.
…By 1900, AP had become the standard for election night
reporting. The Washington Post advised its readers of plans
to display results on a huge screen in front of the newspaper’s
building, including bulletins from AP, “always to be
relied upon,” so the public could have returns “hot
from the wires and without a moment’s delay.”
…By the 1940s, counting votes on election night had
shifted to the Washington bureau, which managed coverage of
the campaigns as well as of the conventions.
…The election in 1952 was notable for another innovation
to speed up the count for AP, a nineteen-hundred-pound machine
that was almost too big for the freight elevator at the Washington
bureau, and required special wiring and extra fuses to run.
“Yup, the mechanical brain really is a whiz on elections,”
White House correspondent Douglas Cornell wrote after the
votes had been tallied. “Feed in a stack of cards with
holes in them, and 35 seconds later out comes a complete table
showing just how the presidential election is going, state
by state.”
The “mechanical brain” was an IBM accounting machine.
“In other elections,” Cornell remembered, “returns
were penciled onto mimeographed forms, compiled on adding
machines and posted on a big blackboard used by lead writers
and editors. The modern version is to write key figures on
cards which are run through the punching machine, one card
for each state.” But that did not mean an end to the
old tote boards and blackboards, comforting relics that were
set up in the Washington bureau every election night until
2004, when high-tech computer displays took over.
…Gradually, in the 1960s and ’70s, AP brought
computers into the mix, frequently hiring local data processors
to tabulate results phoned to state centers. The AP bureau
in New Orleans was a pioneer in computerizing election-night
vote-counting. The first computerized go-round involved punch-cards
which, when fed into a processor, produced tabulated returns
that then had to be keyed onto AP wires.
…The first real complaint about calling races before
the polls had closed was triggered by a presidential candidate
rather than the media. The year was 1980, and (Walter) Mears,
who was writing AP’s main story for the presidential
election, was puzzling over how to call Ronald Reagan the
winner without flatly declaring the race over. It was before
10 p.m. on the East Coast and the outcome was clear, but the
polls still had not closed in California and other western
states.
“At that time,” Mears remembered, “I was
trying to figure out the wording for an election story lead
that would almost but not quite declare Reagan the winner,
hedging because we were still counting votes.” Then
came word that President Jimmy Carter had called Reagan about
an hour earlier to concede. “No presidential candidate
had conceded early since Alton B. Parker bowed to Theodore
Roosevelt, at 9:00 p.m. on election night 1904,” Mears
wrote.
... After 2000, AP began to move back to relying on its own
devices…For the 2004 election, it built and tested a
new system, with checks and double-checks for accuracy, to
take over the vote count. A new consortium, the National Elections
Pool, was created to manage exit polling.
In the end, AP counted the vote in 6,860 races, posting 171,795
updates in a 12-hour period up to 6 a.m. the day after the
election. In addition to the TV networks which were served
exclusively by AP, more than 600 members and other customers
took special state election wires and 336 signed up for AP
Elections Online, a Web-based service that included for many
a customized page of continually updated returns, with color
maps to help display voting patterns in states and across
the country. Many customers signed up for the AP Politics
Web site which included access to a browser similar in design
to that provided to the TV networks.
AP Television News broadcast live from tabulation centers
in New York and Spokane, Washington, to a worldwide audience
estimated at more than a billion viewers …
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