To call or not to call. That is the question.
With some pundits and analysts predicting a large win by U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, at least one network -- CBS -- and one Web site -- Slate -- are considering calling the election as early as 8 p.m. Eastern Time, long before the last polls close in Gov. Sarah Palin's home state of Alaska at 1 a.m. Eastern Time.
And it's not just the networks, as indicated above. It's the Internet, Web sites, alternative media, blogs.
According to a report in the New York Times, CBS might call it as early as 8 p.m. Eastern Time if certain states line a clear path to one candidate's electoral victory.
A senior vice president of CBS News, Paul Friedman, said the prospects for Barack Obama or John McCain meeting the minimum threshold of electoral votes could be clear as soon as 8 p.m. — before polls in even New York and Rhode Island close, let alone those in Texas and California. At such a moment, determined from a combination of polling data and samples of actual votes, the network could share its preliminary projection with viewers, Mr. Friedman said.
“We could know Virginia at 7,” he said. “We could know Indiana before 8. We could know Florida at 8. We could know Pennsylvania at 8. We could know the whole story of the election with those results. We can’t be in this position of hiding our heads in the sand when the story is obvious.”
Is this the right thing to do? U.S. Rep. John Dingell, Democrat of Michigan doesn't think so.
As the New York Times reports:
With some national polls suggesting that Mr. Obama was heading for a potential electoral landslide, news organizations were preparing for a race that could be far less close than those in 2004 or 2000. The nearest precedent could be 1980, when the networks projected Ronald Reagan to have defeated Jimmy Carter shortly after the polls closed in the East. Later, the secretaries of state from Washington, Oregon and other Western states argued that, as a result of the networks’ early call that year, voter turnout in California dropped by about 2 percent.
Other experts, though, have argued that any impact by the networks on turnout was far outweighed by Mr. Carter’s having made a concession speech shortly after the networks broadcast their results.
It does seem most networks are going to avoid projecting a winner based on exit polls, a practice that burned a few of them in 2004, said the New York Times:
In 2004, early exit poll data suggested that Mr. Kerry was ahead began circulating within newsrooms — and leaking out on Web sites, including Slate’s — early in the afternoon on Election Day. This year, the consortium of six news organizations gathering the exit poll data — NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, CNN and The Associated Press — have agreed to keep the information under quarantine until 5 p.m.
Representatives of those news organizations will begin analyzing that information at a secret location beginning in late morning, but will have to surrender all electronic devices at the door; even restroom visits will be supervised. There were already signs on Monday that the additional security was paying off.
