Press: Election Night Razzle-Dazzle

How a network programs its computer to pick the winners

When the last campaign speech has been made and the last voter warned about that other fellow, the candidates, like almost everybody else, will be sitting in front of television sets somewhere next Tuesday night waiting to find out who is in and who is not. That is when a truly ferocious contest begins: the three-way race among network news divisions to call ’em first and get ’em right. In that war, victory belongs to the best “software,” or computer program, for picking winners.

Tracking races for 435 House seats, 34 senatorial slots and 13 governorships, as well as 51 separate presidential sprints in some 175,000 voting precincts, is an awesome task for any journalist. But things have changed quite a bit since the stone age days of 1960, when all through Election Night at NBC the latest figures were hauled up to the Huntley-Brinkley anchor booth in a wicker basket on a rope.

There are no wicker baskets around this year. Instead, TV viewers will be razzle-dazzled with more computer-generated graphics, more computerized data collection and less finger-in-the-wind speculation than ever before.

What goes into the computers remains a closely guarded secret at all three networks. What comes out of them will be visible starting at 7 p.m. E.S.T. Election Night. At CBS, which is typical of the networks in its election preparations, Walter Cronkite will have three computer screens in front of him on the anchor desk flashing the latest numbers on the pres1 idential race and various other contests. Tight races and those in which CBS has picked a winner will show up with brighter intensity on these screens. Each of the four regional correspondents with him —Dan Rather, Harry Reasoner, Lesley Stahl and Bob Schieffer—will have two computer readout screens and a small data-processing unit.

The correspondents will have election handbooks as thick as telephone directories briefing them on what to watch in each state, but they can also put questions to the computer, which has been programmed with a vast library of CBS research. Some have taken to the new futuristic consoles more readily than others: Dan Rather, reportedly, revels in them, spending idle hours punching up new information. Cronkite seems a bit wary, though he says, “It sure beats all that paper piling up all night long.”

To help the reporters feel at home with the consoles, CBS Election Producer Russ Bensley has been conducting a series of tutorials for the past three weeks. He is also providing them with a 117-page book on how to read their computer screens, which will be teeming with abbreviations, codes and numbers. Candidates’ names, for instance, are shortened to three or four letters in tiny type (CART, REAG, AND). Before CBS can call a winner, the computer must call it first; it flashes a C next to its choice. If Election and Survey Unit Director Warren Mitofsky concurs with the computer’s judgment, a W will turn up next to the name. Then the choice will be announced, but not as a “winner.” Cautions the handbook:

“Winners should be described as ‘estimated winners.’ Avoid any reference to ‘calling’ races or ‘declaring’ winners. Do not refer to estimates as ‘projections.’ ” How will the computer know what “estimates” to make? Mitofsky, a former Census Bureau statistician, has selected 4,000 key precincts nationwide to show him what is happening in each state. A CBS employee in each of those precincts will phone in results to a bank of computer-terminal operators in a soon-to-be demolished Manhattan warehouse. If this information seems to add up to a clear victory, the computer can flash its C.

How will a voter know if he or she lives in a key precinct? One way is to ask poll workers if there is anyone from a network (CBS or NBC) or from the League of Women Voters (ABC) lurking around. In Atlanta, for instance, CBS will station vote reporters in nine precincts. They range from the all-black, heavily Democratic, low-income Precinct 10-T, whose voters will cast their ballots at Turner High School near the Perry Homes Public Housing Project, to Precinct 8-E, with polls at the Margaret Mitchell School on Atlanta’s affluent northwest side, white, liberal Republican territory.

Unlike his competitors at NBC and ABC, Mitofsky picks his sample precincts on a strictly statistical basis. Says he: “I don’t believe in expert advice and hunches. All I want to know is how many people live there, which party did they support last time around and which county is it in? If my group of precincts reflects these factors in a state, then we will have a pretty good picture of how that state is voting.” Mitofsky has made only one bad call at CBS in 13 years: Ford, not Carter, ended up winning Oregon in 1976.

ABC’S election-unit whiz, John Thompson, is mystified by Mitofsky’s approach. Thompson spends months every year crisscrossing the country, talking to local election officials and learning all he can about each state before picking his precincts. Roy Wetzel, his counterpart at NBC, takes a similar tack. Says Thompson: “Mine is a subjective judgment. I know how to talk to people to get the kind of information I want. Then I put it into the computer.”

And what if the computers fail? NBC’s entire system did on Election Night 1964, leaving Huntley and Brinkley without any fast facts. In 1976, Mitofsky’s terminal had a nervous breakdown halfway through the night. Fortunately, he had a spare.

Reported by Mary Cronin/New York