All eyes on US TV networks for election night ‘High Stakes’

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Facing a results vacuum that could last for weeks, U.S. TV networks are preparing to fill the airwaves against a backdrop of unprecedented pressure to avoid errors and a flood of misinformation.

In 2020, it took four tense days before President Joe Biden’s victory was announced.

This year, experts and observers will once again await the puzzle of states that will be declared one by one for the Democrats or the Republicans, and with them their votes in the electoral college, of which 270 are needed to win.

“It’s all going to come down to seven really competitive swing states, and in many of those states we won’t have enough data to make a projection until late this evening, early the next day, or in some cases. “It could be days after the election,” said Joe Lenski, executive vice president of Edison Research.

His organization will produce exit polls, projections and vote counts for the ABC, CBS, NBC News and CNN networks.

In addition to a complex electoral system, voting and counting procedures differ per region.

Lenski points to Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, two important swing states, which will not start counting the first votes until Election Day on November 5.

With no official results in weeks, it’s up to TV news networks to call states for former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris.

Behind the fancy TV studios, the real pressure will not be on the presenters and experts, but on the network decision agencies, teams of statisticians and analysts who will feed the presenters with estimates based on the fragmentary initial results.

“The stakes are very high… there is enormous pressure to captivate viewers by giving them information as quickly as it is available, but the biggest risk is sacrificing accuracy for speed,” says Costas Panagopoulos, professor in political science from Northeastern University and a former member of the NBC decision desk.

On November 3, 2020, just a few hours after the polls closed, America’s most popular conservative channel Fox News dealt a blow to Trump’s chances by calling Arizona for Biden.

The announcement, which was confirmed by other media a few days later, enraged the Trump camp.

Perhaps most infamous were the U-turn networks that emerged in 2000 after Florida’s premature drafting for Democratic contender Al Gore.

To avoid a repeat of this credibility-damaging episode, the media is relying on more sophisticated analytics using not only exit polls but also surveys of early voters.

Election attorney Ben Ginsberg said he expected the “red mirage” of 2020, the apparent Republican lead that faded when mail-in ballots popular with Democrats were added to the numbers.

“What remains unclear is whether a Republican effort this year to get their voters to vote early will change that pattern,” Ginsberg added in an editorial in The New York Times.

In the marathon race for a result, broadcasters will battle to hold on to their audiences while trying to uphold accuracy and transparency against an expected tidal wave of disinformation about alleged election fraud.

CNN will once again erect its “magic wall,” allowing its chief national correspondent John King to visually represent trends and showcase his encyclopedic knowledge of past voices.

NBC News has published several articles detailing how data from more than 100,000 polling places will be collected starting November 5.

They also detailed the precautions that will be taken to accurately project the results of 610 polls, including elections for the Senate and House of Representatives.

“The amount of data that our partner news organizations are providing to their viewers… is more data than ever before. There’s more detail, there’s more maps, there’s more analysis than ever,” Lenski said.

“Delays in themselves are not evidence of a conspiracy,” Ginsberg wrote in his column.

“If either candidate turns up the heat and declares victory before the votes are counted, dismiss it as a political posturing.”