Posted on 09/27/2014 1:31:11 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
There was really no reason to think that the Ace of Spades HQ Decision Desk would be a hopeful sign for American democracy in 2014.
The Decision Desk swings into action on primary election nights, with Brandon Finnigan, a burly 29-year-old, nailed to a busted black leather armchair at one of those cheap beige aluminum desks, halfhearted fake wood top, toward the back of a low-slung house at a truck stop crossroads deep in Californias monotonous Inland Empire. Dripping sweat every day since the air conditioner broke, Finnigan is the sole employee of a small truck dispatching company where he pulls the noon-to-midnight shift. He manages the dispatching job on one computer monitor. Finnigans second monitor, however, is for election results.
Between calls from drivers broken down in San Diego, and between visits from men there to drop off paperwork, he tracks election results for Ace of Spades HQ, a conservative blog run by an anonymous, combative figure known only as Ace. Ace and his sites mission has not, historically, been the sort of thing David Brooks gets excited about. The blogs motto is, Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. Its founders scabrous style of parody has at times given offense: Please dont call Sandra Fluke a slut, he tweeted (and later deleted) of the abortion rights advocate and liberal icon . Respect her for what she is, a shiftless rent-a-cooch from East Whoreville.
And yet, politics is always surprising, and the eternal Washington consensus that anything thats good for democracy must come from the center has not been borne out here.
Finnigan along with his dozens of volunteer Google spreadsheet jockeys is the most ambitious face of a major and democratizing shift in the way Americans learn about the results of the most important elections in the country.
I want to fundamentally change how results are reported, Finnigan told BuzzFeed News. His goal is both to modernize the local election boards and to deflate what he sees as false drama imposed by slow Associated Press calls and desperate television commentators. I understand you need an element of suspense and you need something to jibber-jabber about on election night. But you got to jibber-jabber all year. I just want the results.
Until about 2011, the way Americans received their information who won, who lost was dominated by the television networks. Their theatrical presentation and deliberate mystification turned their analysts smart, numerate political hands with years of election experience into a kind of political priesthood whose calls, particularly in the disputed 2000 election, were alleged to have shaped the outcome of a close race. Virtually all other contests were called by only one entity: the AP. The news wire neither rushes nor explains its decisions, which have been turned into a different kind of mysterious black box in part because it is bound contractually to share its results first with the news organizations who pay for those decisions. The AP essentially controlled when Americans learned who won an election.
But something significant has changed in the last few years: The geeky new obsession with political data. It really started with liberal bloggers who took polling seriously, and with the nerd king Nate Silver, who made his name reassuring Democrats that Barack Obama was, still, winning.
The conversation has moved from polling to the polls. The people counting the actual votes county officials across the United States have started putting precinct-by-precinct tallies online. Now that same data that only the AP could access, anyone can access. And so a group of a couple dozen devoted journalists and partisans assemble on Twitter on Tuesday nights through the summer and fall to watch election returns, county by county, pop up on the websites of registrars and clerks. They parse the results as they come in, they argue over what they mean, and sometimes they catch the sort of substantial errors transposed digits, or uncounted ballots that happen occasionally in preliminary election counts. They typically reach a consensus about who will win long before the AP has made its once-definitive call, based on the same factors the AP looks at the likelihood that the candidate who trails in the vote can close the gap with the outstanding votes, given both statistics and the voting history of the precincts waiting to be counted.
Now Finnigan and his ragtag Decision Desk have taken that transformation a step further. His volunteers, unlike the rest of amateur and professional media alike, dont just rely on published figures and AP tallies. Theyve also begun to replicate the APs vast information-gathering network at the clerks offices that dont report data swiftly online, organizing a cadre of whats now 130 volunteers to collect results directly from local officials. Its the next logical step for the small fraternity of election-night analysts, doing in public what the large media institutions have typically done in the dark. And while they have a tiny fraction of the APs roughly 5,000 local reporters gathering results, they naturally focus on the relative handful of races of national interest, and have become central to a political conversation that has been for years now shaped on Twitter. Their slick website, built by a volunteer developer and blogger named John Ekdahl to aggregate both polling and election results, relaunched this week.
The volunteer election callers have caught major errors, including thousands of uncounted votes in Virginias Fairfax County last year. Theyve also hashed out bitterly partisan controversies in remarkably objective terms. And perhaps most importantly, theyve punctured the mystery around the mechanics of democracy and produced flashes of consensus in a country whose partisans often seem to occupy different realities, and whose media have never been less trusted.
Those of us in the amateur election projection world on election night are using our familiarity with the nooks and crannies of geography to beat the AP to the punch. The APs job is to be cautious, but most of the time these elections can be called well before the AP does, said Dave Wasserman, an editor at the Cook Political Report who tweets from @redistrict (and caught the Fairfax County error), but laments that he has to be absent from Twitter for big election nights because hes under contract to NBC.
APs Washington bureau chief, Sally Buzzbee, said she welcomes the Twitter conversation.
Anything that helps people understand how elections happen and the process and of democracy is terrific. Transparency is wonderful, she said, adding that participating in the Twitter conversation would distract analysts from their jobs and undermine the organizations core mission. Everybody in AP is comfortable that we dont break news on Twitter we break news by giving our stuff to news organizations.
But the participants in the new, live results conversation see the AP as a stodgy monopolist, ripe for disruption.
What Ace of Spades is doing is really great because its so transparent and because the AP needs competition, said David Nir, the political director of the venerable liberal site Daily Kos, and often the man running @DKElections, another of the core election night feeds. What the AP does is very opaque and nobody knows what goes on behind the wizards curtain.
From behind his Fontana desk, Finnigan shares the bipartisan goodwill.
When youre dealing with people who really love elections, like we do and they do, partisanship doesnt really matter you want to report whats going on, he said.
Finnigan traces his start as an unofficial election junkie to 2004. He was an art major at McDaniel College outside Baltimore, a little stoned, watching the results come in and frustrated as theatrical network anchors kept holding back on declaring George W. Bush the victor.
Once I heard the number of absentees, I was like theres no reason for [John Kerry] to not concede, hes not going to win, Finnigan recalled.
In 2006, he followed his girlfriend to California for the summer, then decided to stay, landed the truck dispatching job, and dropped out of school. The job gave him ample time to become more politically engaged online, moving to the right from his undergraduate libertarianism to hold strong views not just on lower taxation and less government but also strong opposition to abortion. Hes also extremely libertarian on drugs and LGBT rights. He found a home on Ace of Spades HQ, a blog devoted in part to heated combat with the liberal and mainstream media. Its founders sheer obsessive energy has at times put the site in the center of the national conversation, as when Ace (who didnt respond to a request for his real name, which Finnigan also doesnt know) caught a strange, quickly deleted tweet by Rep. Anthony Weiner and helped start the chain of events that led to his resignation.
Finnigan started commenting there and emailing Ace in 2007; the founder soon asked him to blog, and he provided obsessive electoral coverage, along with longer apolitical diversions a piece on living in a haunted house, and a long guide to his other hobby, astronomy.
Finnigan, working weeknights alone in the Fontana office, started the informal Ace of Spades Headquarters Decision Desk in 2012, with only the vague approval of Ace. Then, he and a small handful of volunteers began tracking publicly available results of the hottest elections in a Google Doc. They gradually grew more numerous and sophisticated, and this February Finnigan emerged as a major figure in that small, influential Twitter conversation as @AOSHQDD. This summer, his team began to really take on the AP at its own game: not just projecting elections based on public results, but also calling county offices directly to feed the tallies into a spreadsheet.
What followed was an inspiring spectacle: Students, stay-at-home moms, retirees, people battling with cancer and looking for a distraction a range of members of Aces conservative community dove in. There were a dozen volunteers, then 30; now some 130 are self-assembling for this November.
One of those volunteers is Carol Tarasewicz, who is home from her longtime job as controller for a real estate management company with neck pain, living on painkillers, she said. Shed been listening to the conservative talker Mark Levin, and talked Finnigan into letting her monitor Levins hobbyhorse, House Majority Leader Eric Cantors widely ignored primary. She tracked the county-by-county results obsessively, and frantically emailed Finnigan when Chesterfield County went for his rival, David Brat.
At 6:31 p.m., @AOSHQDD called the race for Brat. AP followed about half an hour later.
And what did Tarasewicz get out of the evenings work? The thrill, and the distraction.
Its fun that was the most exciting night of my life since Scott Brown won in Massachusetts, she said.
The amateurs are still a long way from replacing AP. One major difference is the scale: The AP calls state legislative contests in 50 states, county, and city races in some places, for an expected total of more than 5,000 this year.
Another is the philosophy. The AP believes, for instance, that it has a public trust not to issue its magical call on major races in situations where that could prevent people from turning out for still-competitive down-ballot ones. So this August in Hawaii, where voting was delayed in two storm-damaged precincts for a week, the AP waited a week before calling the Democratic senatorial primary despite the fact that results from the other precincts made the result a foregone conclusion.
We dont want to do anything that suppresses voter turnout, said Buzzbee.
For Finnigan, who had made the call on election night, calling was a matter of simple math, and of transparency with what was, after all, public data: There was absolutely no way those districts were going to overturn [Brian] Schatzs lead, he said.
In the radical transparency of Twitter and the web, theres also less of a trade-off between speed and accuracy than the AP has. Your readers see the same data you do. If you get it wrong, they see where youre coming from, and you can correct. And neither Finnegan nor the AP executives pretend theres more than intelligent analysis, memory, and judgment to figuring out whether a race is really done. Finnigan has, this year, gotten 47 out of 48 right. (The AP got just six of 4,653 calls wrong in 2012, Director of Election Services Brian Scanlon said.)
If 2004 spurred Finnigans frustration with the mainstream media mystification, it was 2012 that brought home to him the value to his own movement of aggressive, accurate election results. In the waning days of the 2012 election, many conservatives simply refused to believe public polling suggesting President Obama would easily win reelection. Instead, they resorted to amateur unskewing of the polls removing Democrats from their samples. The plan seemed reasonable; it turned into an embarrassing debacle, evidence to conservatives and their enemies alike of a dangerous detachment from reality that crystallized when Karl Rove, late into the defeat, tried to persuade Fox News not to accept its own analysts call.
I wanted to punch my TV set when Rove said no, said Finnigan. We knew Florida was doomed about an hour in, and heres a guy whos a supposed expert That whole mentality of not trusting things and being distrustful of the numbers no, the polls are what they are, accept that.
American elections have always been, in close races, frighteningly contingent. The machines are rusty, the volunteers are clueless, the voters get confused. And some of what has undermined recent confidence in the machinery of democracy is substantive and irresolvable disputes over voting practices: Did an early call in 2000 send Republicans in the Florida panhandle home? How many Kerry voters were dissuaded by the long lines in Cleveland?
But that lack of confidence also at times misunderstands a systems piecemeal fragility and makes it hard to manipulate on a large scale. And Twitter has played a surprisingly powerful role in nipping what could have easily become perennial conspiracy theories in the bud. This was never clearer than in a high-profile Wisconsin judicial race in 2011, where the Republican clerk of Waukesha County discovered missing votes that added 8,000 to the Republican candidates margin something that liberals and conservatives on Twitter argued about, and then agreed on.
I dont know any serious analyst who thinks that election was stolen, said Daily Kos Nir.
This, too, is a shared partisan interest there may be few matters of broad national consensus left, but the importance of trustworthy elections is one.
The deep motives that draw Ace of Spades HQ and Daily Kos together, though, remain partisan. Partisans dont just want to enjoy the drama. They want to win. Nir got his start running the Swing State Project, a blog whose aim was in part to demystify polling results and tell liberal Kos readers where to volunteer and where to donate. Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas recalled in an email that in his first year blogging, 2002, he got carried away by wishful thinking of a Democratic sweep and vowed, after that, to maintain a slavish devotion to data.
We want to win. Not spin. Win. And in order to do that, you have to look at the real facts, not what you want to happen, said Daily Kos Executive Editor Susan Gardner in an email. And I would guess thats why Ace of Spaces, on the other side of the aisle, is better than objective news sources.
Finnigans host, Ace, is less philosophical about the matter. He takes an anarchist approach to his own site, and so Finnigan thanked him, at the time of the relaunch, for our total indifference and utter lack of influence, encouragement, or inspiration. Ace responded with the headline, Local Moron Makes Good.
Ace said in an email that he had paid little attention to the machine Finnigan was building and tuning, until the night of June 10, when he was having dinner with a friend, who looked up from his phone to report that Cantor had lost. Ace didnt believe it.
Is that confirmed? Is that from a real source? he asked.
Its from your site, the friend replied.
I was a bit worried, wondering if [Finnigan] had gotten too far ahead of the numbers, Ace recalled. But as the numbers came in, of course, they confirmed his call.
UPDATE: This story has been updated to make clearer that Aces remark about Sandra Fluke was intended as parody, in an argument about humor and faux outrage.
Here is an Ace of Spades podcast where I think they talk a bit about the desk, Eric Holder’s resignation etc. http://ace.mu.nu/archives/352079.php
Very, very nice post that should be a MUST READ for Freeper Election Junkies. Unfortunately, FR has mostly become a Conservative Twitter where any post longer than two sentences is often ignored.
For my part, I signed up for the Ace of Spades podcast and plan to spend some time checking out the A of S website.
Scroll down in this narrative about election predictions to find a nugget of information about vote recording in Waukesha in the 2011 judicial election. Remember the Waukesha clerk controversy?
FReep Mail me if you want on, or off, this Wisconsin interest ping list.
“Unfortunately, FR has mostly become a Conservative Twitter where any post longer than two sentences is often ignored.”
There are still plenty of literate readers and good threads. They’re just buried in the twitter feed posts. FR has a lot of Ace’s articles. His acerbic wit is not always appreciated by the thin skinned bots who infest all the sites these days.
Interesting article. I used to think Buzzfeed was a left-wing site but I’m not so sure anymore. First they broke the story about Mary Burke’s platform plagiarism (or whatever you want to call it) and now this. This is good journalism, the kind the MSM stopped doing a long time ago.
‘Deliberate mystification’ is an apt two-word summary of the MSM.
The AP lady doth protest too much. They are an anachronism and their propaganda monopoly must be eliminated.
This is right up your alley!
The AP is a monopoly; no American journalism outlet is major which does not belong to it. And in a larger sense, to the extent that other wire services do compete with the AP, they have the same institutional incentives as the AP has.Those two characteristics which are intrinsic to journalism slant it towards cynicism and against conservatism and long-range thinking. The effect of the AP and any other wire services is to homogenize journalism by creating a 24/7/365 virtual meeting among all of major journalism.
- Journalism as such tends towards criticism and certainly never tries to actually do the deeds that it critiques others attempts at.
- Journalism as such is about what happened today/yesterday, as if every day had equally significant events coming to light.
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. - Adam Smith, Wealth of NationsThe AP was found to be a monopoly by SCOTUS in 1945, but back then its mission - the economical use of transmission bandwidth in the dissemination of news nationwide and worldwide made it too big to fail. Almost 3/4 of a century later satellite, microwave, and fiber optic communication technology have obliterated the problem of transmission bandwidth cost. Now the AP is not too big to fail - it is too big, period.The AP must be sued into oblivion, on grounds of what it does not report. Half the truth is often a great lie (Franklin) - and the systematic avoidance of reporting of facts which do not undercut conservatives (and promote instability such as Ferguson) is the consistent theme of journalism as we know it.
Competitive journalism could not possibly allow promotion of the Saint Skittles fraud, or of most of the other frauds upon which the Democratic Party consistently relies. The great problem is to get this issue into a forum where logic rather than demagoguery can prevail. And to craft a remedy not worse than the disease. The AP should, IMHO, be broken up - but according to what criteria, I am open to serious suggestions. Essentially, the problem is the overemphasis on the immediate which has been cultivated in the electorate by wire service journalism. This has enabled wire service journalism to cultivate a cult of omniscience, styled objectivity. Most of the time, however, it is not what WS journalism reports but what it does not - it is de facto censorship which all members of the AP are complicit in - which we at FR know because we pay attention to sources outside the AP borg, and to inconsistencies within that borg.
Ultimately it is not the AP alone, but the synergism with TV and the imprimatur of the FCC which really exploits the credulousness of the public. And the FCC depends for its credibility on the unmerited reputation of seeBS et al. Once dispose of the objectivity myth, and the rationale for the FCC and of the FEC both vanish.
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