West’s Voters Won’t Concede to TV’s Time

It’s election day. You leave work at 5 on the dot. You need to stop for milk and get home to see the children you have not seen all day. But first, you are going to vote for the next president of the United States. You navigate a level of rush hour traffic you did not know existed because you never leave work at 5 on the dot. You pull into the driveway of your neighborhood polling place just in time to hear on your car radio that the networks have projected a winner.

“Shoot,” you mumble, rebuckling your seat belt. “I’m going to Vons.”

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Somewhere in California, this happens every four years. Once the verdict is in, it would be easier for network anchors to hold their breath for two hours than to withhold the name of the next president of the United States a nanosecond after they know it.

“We must not allow our election day to become the equivalent of drive-through democracy, where expediency is gained at the expense of fairness,” California Secretary of State Bill Jones wrote in a preelection letter begging the networks not to do it again this year.

They did. The word came about 6 p.m. Pacific time--two full hours before the polls closed--that President Clinton had won. Past data collected on American voting patterns suggest that as many as 5% of voters in California and seven other Western states promptly bailed. While those lost votes had no impact whatsoever on the presidential race, experts believe that they might have influenced congressional or statewide contests.

Democrats are still stinging over 1980, when President Jimmy Carter conceded to Ronald Reagan two hours before the West had finished voting. The news was said to have sent voters fleeing from the polls. Many believe that caused Democratic Rep. James C. Corman to lose his San Fernando Valley seat to Republican Bobbi Fiedler by just 752 votes.

In the 10 years that followed, 53 California races were decided by 3 percentage points or less, suggesting that discouraged voters might have made a difference had the networks clammed up, said Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate in Washington.

It is not yet known how California elections were affected by the early news this time, but a handful of races were too close to call for days. Vanquished Republican Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove) lost by just 984 votes.

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein proposes to do something in the coming year about this quadrennial problem with a bill that would require all polls in the nation to close at the same time, making it harder for television to blow the ending.

“Look how many races in California were decided by razor-thin margins. Even a modest increase in voter turnout could easily have changed the outcome in half a dozen elections,” the senator said.

The particulars of the bill are still being worked out by Feinstein’s staff. But past experience suggests that a solution is not as simple as it sounds.

The House of Representatives in the 1980s twice passed two complex bills requiring uniform poll closure. Both measures died in the Senate, and no wonder.

One would have ended voting at 10 in the East and 7 in the West--meaning that the Eastern states would have spent more money keeping polls open later than ever while the Western states got cheated out of an hour of voting.

Lawmakers tried to get around that by “bending time”--delaying the end of daylight saving time two weeks in the West and leaving just a two-hour time difference between the coasts on election night. But some feared that fooling around with the clocks any more than necessary would have confused the entire country.

“We held field hearings; we called in the networks. We looked at holiday voting, weekend voting, anything that might solve this,” said Republican Rep. Bill Thomas of Bakersfield, who co-sponsored the bills. “You can’t put this genie in the bottle.”

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Gans thinks lawmakers are going about this thing the wrong way, revising the hallowed election system so the media can do what he thinks they shouldn’t be doing in the first place.

“This is not a problem with the election system,” he said. “It’s a problem of network arrogance.”

Gans suggests passing a law prohibiting any news about voting results until every poll has closed, which he says is the way they do it in Canada. But that runs straight up against the 1st Amendment, and Congress is not likely to dip a toe into that legislative swamp. No, if this problem is to be fixed, it will probably be the voter--not time and not the media--who bends.

“We are the biggest state and we have to be contended with,” California Democratic consultant Bob Mulholland said in a burst of optimism that went full circle. “Most people agree we have to do something. The question is, what?”