The Importance of Being Responsible : Tuesday’s vote is too crucial to be influenced by unnecessarily early network projections

Are Americans taking a renewed healthy interest in how they’re governed, and by whom? Voter registration figures nationwide suggest that a surprisingly large number are at least thinking seriously about going to the polls next Tuesday. If those numbers prove to accurately indicate actual turnout--as we hope they do--it would be good news indeed.

Voter turnout in presidential and other elections has been declining steadily over the last 30 years. That means, bluntly, that a shrinking percentage of citizens has been directly deciding who will hold office and indirectly determining what laws are likely to be enacted, laws that will affect the lives of everyone in this country. In fact, if the trend continues, before long fewer than half of eligible voters will be going to the polls. That’s not a prescription for effective democracy. That’s why the prospect of a higher voter turnout this year is encouraging.

That prospect, however, could be adversely affected by the interest of the television networks in projecting a winner in the presidential race. That concerns officials in California, Oregon and Washington, where polls close as late as three hours after those in the eastern United States. The Western states have joined with the nonpartisan Committee for the Study of the American Electorate to ask the networks not to project a presidential winner until after 8 p.m. on the West Coast. Curtis Gans, director of the committee, asks that nothing be done on Election Day “to further erode voting and further undermine confidence in the electoral process.” More than 150 members of Congress have issued a similar appeal to the heads of the major networks. “Every time a network projects while citizens are still voting,” says the congressional letter, “it sends a message that the votes of those still waiting to cast their ballots do not matter.”

The networks reject these urgings. They argue that they deal in information--in the immediate case, their projections of a presidential winner--to which the public has a timely right; this is guaranteed by the Constitution. But of course the issue here is not censorship or any other infringement on the First Amendment. The issue is how the timing of the networks’ projections of a presidential winner might affect the outcome of voting in many states.

Early projections, made while the polls in the West remain open, could influence the results in some congressional and other contests by discouraging turnout; even if only 1% or 2% of voters decide at the last minute to stay home because of TV forecasting, the outcomes in any number of close races could be changed. The networks should reconsider. What’s involved here is not free speech or even journalistic competition, but simply responsible restraint.