Networks Project Winners--and Voters Lose

The major television networks said today that they plan to project a presidential winner a day before the election, eliminating the need for voters to go to the polls.

The networks hailed the move as a victory for “the people’s right to know the outcome of an event before it happens.”

Spokesmen for ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN brushed aside criticism of their decision by saying that any attempt to have the networks withhold data from their scientific surveys of randomly selected psychics would amount to censorship. “We’re in business to report news, not withhold it,” said one spokesman.

Nahhhhhh.

Even the networks wouldn’t go that far. Yet what they do promise to do--again project a presidential victor before some states’ polls close--is unpleasant enough. At the very least it’s a symbolic disenfranchising of voters in the West and, at the very most, it’s an intrusion that could affect the outcome of local and state races.

A possible scenario:

It’s a little after 5 p.m. You’re preparing to leave for your polling place to vote for one of the Top Three when you hear an announcement on TV that George Bush, Bill Clinton or Ross Perot is the presidential winner. Even if your candidate is the anointed one, your jaw still drops. It’s as if America held an election and didn’t invite you. You feel cheated, robbed, as if you were sitting pretty and about to bet in a high-stakes poker game when someone reached across your shoulder and snatched your royal flush.

More than merely disheartening, it’s flat-out demoralizing.

Do you pull yourself together and proceed to the polls anyway so that you can cast your now irrelevant vote for President and, much more importantly, also weigh in on the two Senate races and numerous other important ballot choices facing you and your fellow Californians?

Or do you pack it in and stay home, even though yours might be one of the deciding votes in the tight Beilenson-McClintock race in the 24th Congressional District? Or in that county supervisor contest? Or in that city council election in the suburb where you live? Or in balloting for local and state initiatives?

And if you’re not voting because the presidential race has already been called by the networks, how many others are doing the same, and what cumulative impact will that have? The common wisdom is that small turnouts benefit the Republicans and large turnouts help the Democrats. Thus, should early presidential projections stunt voter turnout in the West, might not other partisan contests be affected?

At this point, hard facts intrude. The networks and some members of Congress have insisted for years that the problem is not the projections but the absence of a uniform poll closing time nationwide. “We have horse-and-buggy election laws in an electronic age,” Ed Turner, CNN executive vice president, said Thursday.

Various plans have been advanced to rectify the problem, but Congress has resisted passing any one of them. Thus the onus of responsibility remains with they networks.

The networks argue, correctly, that there is no conclusive evidence that projections of winners alter election outcomes. Nor, however, is there conclusive evidence that they don’t. Or won’t.

“I know that 10,000 angels saying so (that other elections aren’t affected by early presidential projections) won’t convince people in the West,” Turner acknowledged. But even if there is one milliliter of doubt, that should be justification enough for the networks to hold back.

Although some would argue that projections, technically speaking, are not news, few have questioned the accuracy of the exit polls on which they’re based. And the networks will not call presidential races in individual states before the polls in those states have closed, and will name a national presidential winner only when a candidate is projected to have won enough states to earn the 270 electoral votes required for victory.

The narrower the electoral gap, the slower the national projections.

Tuesday would not be the first time the networks’ created a controversy by projecting a presidential winner based on their exit poll data. As far back as 1980, that data figured in President Jimmy Carter’s decision to concede victory to Ronald Reagan 90 minutes before polls closed on the West Coast. And network projections of Reagan’s 1984 victory and George Bush’s 1988 win also preceded the closing of polls in the West, with CBS and ABC leading the pack at 6:17 p.m. and 6:20 p.m., respectively, more than hour ahead of more cautious NBC and CNN.

The network excuses for doing this haven’t varied through the years.

“We’re not in the business of withholding news,” an ABC spokesperson said recently. “At CBS News, we don’t believe in withholding information from the people,” Dan Rather echoed this week.

Balderdash. These are the kind of self-serving platitudes that the news media cower behind when they are challenged. Actually, they withhold information all the time.

They withhold the names of confidential sources. They withhold the names of juvenile offenders. They withhold information that could endanger the national security. They withhold the names of rape victims. (NBC broke away from the crowd on the latter in the case of William Kennedy Smith’s accuser, but if the other networks weren’t guarding the woman’s identity then why the blue dot?)

“This is the election of a President,” CNN’s Turner said. “It’s not like we’re giving away plans for the invasion of Iraq. You know it’s not just us (the networks). Stations out there (in the West) could add up the electoral votes, too, and report what they know.”

Which is not to say that local stations should do so--before the polls close. Or that for just a few hours on election day--a modest concession, really--the networks should not use the good old blue dot on their own presidential projections.