Will the US media call the right winner on election night? Don't count on it
This November’s presidential election may be close, and it is certain to be disputed. Remember what happened in November of 2000? Florida was called prematurely for Gore at 8pm, then called again for Bush at 2.30am. Gore conceded privately to Bush but later retracted the concession as an automatic recount began. The Bush team was skilled and successful in the propaganda war that followed. Something like this could happen again. The upcoming election will be fought out in the media over how and when votes are counted and the results interpreted. Despite the uncertainty of a large number of mailed ballots, the media outlets will again compete to make the call and earn the eyeballs of viewers on election night. We need to take innovative steps, starting now, to ensure the election is called in a fair and accurate way.
Donald Trump has disparaged mail voting, demanded that the election be called on election day itself, and claimed that any election he does not win must be rigged. Democrats are creating a legal response team of hundreds of lawyers to fight out likely disputes in the courts, and the battle over Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s US supreme court seat is being accelerated in anticipation of a contested election. Everyone is concerned about foreign interference. Doubts about whether the election will be fair are being raised from all directions.
The contest will be won not only at the ballot box and in the courts but in the court of public opinion. Here the media are crucial. Elections are usually “called” long before the votes are actually counted. Seeking to scoop the other major news outlets, TV networks collaborate with exit polling firms to be the first to declare a winner in each race. Once the winner has been called, the candidate declared to be the loser is expected to concede quickly – ideally before many voters have retired for the night – and the winner offers a victory speech that is enthusiastically covered by the same media outlets. The election is over sometimes minutes and rarely more than hours after the polls close, even as official counts of votes are still being tabulated and absentee and mailin ballots sit in warehouses waiting to be opened.
Some media outlets are responsible and concerned about their reputations for accuracy. In today’s competitive market, however, many media companies are both more partisan and hard pressed to present fast results. If, as many predict, the mail-in vote is heavily Democratic and the in-person vote is heavily Republican, Trump may lead in many states with only a partial vote count. If so, Trump will probably declare himself the winner and Fox News will announce this immediately. Any such declaration will create a new reality for the president’s supporters. Knowing this, more liberal media outlets may feel they should declare early for Joe Biden to level the playing field. The remaining media outlets may equivocate, but the storyline is set by those willing to declare a winner.
All votes count, and we should count all votes – including mail ballots that may take weeks to tally. But we should also focus on the calling of elections by the media. Can we really rely on them to call elections fairly? Are they still unbiased observers? Or have their incentives become less to protect democracy and more to attract audiences?
We need bipartisan and authoritative panels to work with the net
works as returns start to come in. Ideally, the media should create an independent panel of election certification, drawn from a diverse body of experts representing both major parties and perhaps including former presidents or other retired politicians. This might be part of a national election commission, as recently proposed by Dan Coats, but the important step is to bring the media together to agree on a responsible standard.
Failing that, all media should develop, before election day, panels of experts to oversee their projections and approve their announcements. Membership on these panels must be bipartisan, public and transparent. Each media outlet should sign a pledge not to declare any candidate a winner until its panel independently approves the projection. The authors of this of essay are all past presidents of the American Political Science Association. We pledge ourselves to work with media in the creation of an independent commission or professional panels of unbiased experts.
Beyond these commissions, the media should do everything in their power to prepare Americans for the near certainty that it will be days or weeks before the election outcome is known. The media should also transform their election night coverage from the election version of Monday Night Football (“It’s Tuesday Night Election: are you ready for some winners?”) to one in which they place short reporting segments throughout the night.
If the outcome is not going to be known on election night, play-by-play coverage on the model of past elections is unnecessary and, in fact, dangerously uninformative. All media should adopt the strict standard that no state winner should be declared until the number of votes remaining to be counted has been certified to be less than the margin between the two major-party candidates.
In reporting, traditional exit polls should not be used to call an election. Because so many intend to vote by mail or in early voting periods, even exit polls enhanced by polling the rest of the public will be highly problematic. When will the media poll the rest of the public? Who will they poll? Poll undecided voters too soon and they may not vote at all or will change their minds. Poll them too late and they could have voted weeks earlier, leaving time for them unconsciously to change what they report. “Enhanced” exit polls that add polling data may give helpful context but will not tell us accurately how the public voted.
If the media take these steps, they could generate the credibility that the current system lacks. With the help of the media, the citizenry can understand that we the people of the United States, in order to have a more perfect union, can wait the hours, days, or weeks necessary to have as perfect a vote count as possible.
John Aldrich, Duke University, APSA president 2013-2014
Robert Axelrod, University of Michigan, APSA president 2006-2007
Janet M Box-Steffensmeier, Ohio State University, APSA president 2020-2021
Henry E Brady, University of California, Berkeley, APSA president 2009-2010
Rodney E Hero, Arizona State University, APSA president 2014-2015
Jennifer L Hochschild, Harvard University, APSA president 2015-2016
M Kent Jennings, University of California, Santa Barbara, APSA president 1997-1998
Robert Jervis, Columbia University, APSA President 2000-2001
Peter J Katzenstein, Cornell University, APSA president 2008-2009
Ira L Katznelson, Columbia University, APSA president 2005-2006
Robert O Keohane, Princeton University, APSA president 1999-2000
David A Lake, University of California, San Diego, APSA president 2016-2017
Margaret Levi, Stanford University, APSA president 2004-2005
Jane J Mansbridge, Harvard University, APSA president 2012-2013
Paula D McClain, Duke University, APSA president 2019-2020
Dianne Pinderhughes, University of Notre Dame, APSA president 2007-2008
G Bingham Powell, Jr, University of Rochester, APSA president 2011-2012
Robert D Putnam, Harvard University, APSA president 2001-2002
Theda Skocpol, Harvard University, APSA president 2002-2003
Rogers M Smith, University of Pennsylvania, APSA president
2018-2019
Kathleen Thelen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, APSA president 2017-2018
The contest will be won not only at the ballot box and in the courts but in the court of public opinion