Ready, set, predict

It’s a theatrical flourish that might seem more at home in an Ice Capades extravaganza than in a newscast. NBC, along with its corporate siblings MSNBC and Telemundo, will be delivering election night returns from sets perched high above the Rockefeller Center skating rink -- where a 65-foot map of the U.S. has been embedded into the ice and awaits filling in with red and blue states as the evening progresses.

For good measure, graphics will be projected up 12 stories of the GE Building, named for NBC’s corporate parent, in back of the rink. A few blocks away in Times Square, CNN is taking over a 96-screen video wall inside Nasdaq’s headquarters to showcase the incoming results from all 50 states. Its coverage will be beamed outside as well on the seven-story Nasdaq Tower, itself a video screen.

There’s nothing like a little razzle-dazzle to try to blot out bad memories of election night 2000. It was a debacle of historic proportion for TV broadcasters, who ended up having to endure congressional hearings to explain what went wrong with their long-standing exit poll system, which generated wrong results from Florida, leading to bad calls, first for Al Gore, then for George W. Bush and finally for no one. The bad reporting added to the chaos and confusion surrounding an election outcome that wasn’t ultimately decided for several weeks and led to charges of bias by the networks.

Notwithstanding the flashy elements that NBC and CNN will be employing, caution is expected to rule the night this time around. “We’re all going to be vying to be last,” said Linda Mason, CBS News vice president.

This year, there is a new collective exit polling system in place, the National Election Pool, which uses a different statistical model that better considers absentee ballots. Associated Press will be providing actual vote counts. Networks have pledged not to project any state winners until all polls in a state have closed, which will push back some calls by at least an hour.

With tryouts during the primaries, “These are fully tested systems,” said Dan Merkle, who is in charge of ABC News’ “decision desk,” the unit whose job it is to decipher the data.

“When we think it’s right, we’ll wait, look at it again, and then make the call,” said Marty Ryan, executive producer of Fox News’ coverage. Fox was the first network in 2000 to declare Bush the president-elect, based on the Florida projections.

“There’s always a passion to be first, but I don’t care if we are last,” said Neal Shapiro, president of NBC News. “We’re not going to get it wrong. Florida taught us painful lessons.”

Individual networks have built in other safeguards. ABC has hired two outside consultants -- political scientists with PhDs -- to be part of a team that must sign off on every call.

CNN is putting its legal analyst, Jeffrey Toobin, in the same room as its decision desk to keep track of any legal challenges that could change or forestall results.

Fox has commissioned its own exit poll, which will mostly be used to understand why voters chose as they did but can also be used as a backup if something goes wrong with the collective poll.

NBC and MSNBC have an exclusive deal with the MYVOTE1 Voter Alert Line, a toll-free service to report polling irregularities. Callers can record comments for NBC News, which will also use the data to pinpoint problems.

Not everyone has settled on the same strategy. NBC News is isolating the decision desk so there won’t be any outside pressure to make a call -- say, seeing a TV set that shows a competitor already projecting a winner -- while CBS has done the opposite, moving the decision desk into the studio so everyone has access to all information.

But across the board, just to make sure viewers get the point, TV coverage will be rife with reporters explaining how their organizations are making projections -- or not.

“ ‘Transparency’ is the word in vogue this election,” said David Bohrman, CNN’s Washington bureau chief, who is overseeing the network’s coverage.

Polls indicate a neck-and-neck race. Depending on how tight the results actually are, there may be no projected or actual winner by the time most viewers go to bed.

ABC last week was working out choreography for “hot-seating Peter into the set,” said Paul Mason, senior vice president, referring to how the network plans to get anchor Peter Jennings onto the set with his “Good Morning America” colleagues, should a decision come that late.

All the networks said they will stay on the air until a winner has been declared or until it is clear there are vote-count issues that will take days to sort out.

Election night TV will look different in other ways too. Most networks are sending out about 25% more reporters and camera crews than last time to locations around the country, including the offices of secretaries of state in places where the vote is expected to be close or legal challenges are likely to pop up.

And NBC is sure to have a few misty-eyed moments as Tom Brokaw covers his last election night after more than two decades as the network’s lead anchor.

All the planning can’t overcome that TV executives don’t really know how the night will go.

“I think anyone who tells you they know what will happen on election night is talking through their hat,” said Shapiro.

As for the more cosmetic elements of the coverage at NBC and CNN, Fox News’ Ryan said his network is more “traditional in how we look at these things.”

“Election night is like a Broadway musical: Nobody leaves humming the set,” he said. “They tune in for the best analysts and reporters.”

CBS, likewise, has shunned a fancy outside set and will focus on its reporting team.

“We have very, very experienced big guns ... those are our bells and whistles,” said Marcy McGinnis, senior vice president, news coverage.

Election night “isn’t about us, it isn’t about where we’re going to sit or how many bells and whistles we put on the information we tell you. It’s about what we’re going to tell you,” said ABC’s Mason.

Shapiro said NBC’s set was meant to provide a place where all the network’s corporate siblings could easily work together, and it was “designed to get people to watch,” not distract.

As for the ice map, he said: “This whole race is about the map, whether it comes out red or blue, and we’re a visual medium, so it is incumbent upon us to present it in an interesting way.”