Science: By the Numbers

In a large green-carpeted hall jammed with college students, flashing phones and clacking keypunch machines, Columbia University Student John Perrotta took the first call from Wisconsin at precisely 9:07 p.m. Perrotta pulled out a coded sheet of paper and quickly penciled in the totals: 133 votes for Gerald Ford; 83 for Ronald Reagan. He noted the call had come from Milwaukee’s Fifth Congressional District and handed the sheet to a dungaree-clad coed, who took it to a bank of keypunch operators.

Within three minutes the vote total was punched, scanned, electronically sent to a computer bank, fed into its system and moved by high-speed teletype to the nation’s wire services and television networks. By the time Perrotta’s phone blinked again, hundreds of other students, technicians and supervisors at two locations in New York City were gathering, sorting and sending out the Wisconsin and New York State votes to their customers.

The little-known agency responsible for this flow of information is a press cooperative called News Election Service. Normally, NES plays a muted second fiddle to television’s dramatic (last week erroneously dramatic) election-night projections, since what it provides is nothing but actual votes. The cooperative was born in the ’60s out of television’s pressure for late-night vote counts that, network executives felt, the wire services were not collecting fast enough. In 1964 the networks badly botched primary coverage. In a tight Goldwater-Rockefeller race in California, network forecasters, relying on competitively reported returns from the state’s 31,000 polling places, ringingly declared both Goldwater and Rockefeller the winner—depending on which channel one was watching.

Haunting Presence. As a result, the three networks and two wire services gave up competitive vote counting and formed NES as a nonprofit cooperative under the direction of Associated Press Newsman J. Richard Eimers. By the fall of 1964 Eimers had organized a network of thousands of poll “reporters,” plus an election-night headquarters staff of hundreds of students and technicians. Today he still directs the system, haunting each election-night performance with his demanding presence.

To bring in the New York primary vote last week, NES had an army of 350 temporary headquarters workers and 75 police telephone operators (by law, only police can tally New York City vote counts directly from the polls), plus 57 county reporters who phoned in the upstate election results. More than half the ballots were tabulated by 11 p.m., and by midnight 77% of the vote was in. “It’s a first-class operation,” says CBS’s Warren Mitofsky, who heads that network’s national-election unit. “NES was probably the only organization in New York State that really knew what was on the ballot.”

For this service the subscribers pay a lot—more than $3 million in combined costs this year. “It’s expensive,” admits U.P.I.’s assistant managing editor, William R. Barrett, “but there really isn’t an alternative.” Official results take weeks to tabulate. The News Election Service is the most sophisticated system yet for bringing unofficial—but correct —vote totals to an eager public.