Posted on 01/13/2003 11:38:54 AM PST by EllaMinnow
Voter News Service Ends After Failures
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Jan 13, 1:09 PM (ET)
By DAVID BAUDER
NEW YORK (AP) - Six major news organizations announced Monday they are disbanding Voter News Service, the consortium they had built to count votes and conduct surveys on Election Day. The decision follows two major election-night failures in a row by VNS.
Given the expense of mounting such operations on their own, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and The Associated Press said they were considering other options for sharing vote counts and exit poll surveys.
But it will no longer be VNS, an operation led by Ted Savaglio, a former CBS News producer.
In November 2000, flawed information from VNS twice led television networks to incorrectly declare a winner in the presidential race in Florida, the state that proved to be key to the outcome. The results there weren't determined until weeks later after recounts and a court battle that was resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court in favor of George W. Bush over Al Gore.
Following that embarrassment, VNS contracted with Battelle Memorial Institute, an Ohio-based research company, to rebuild its system. But in the 2002 election, VNS was unable to provide its members and other clients with results from exit poll surveys. This material is used to help make projections of winners and to supplement the vote count with an analysis of why people voted as they did.
The dissolution of VNS means that the system Battelle was building will not be completed, according to a network executive who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Voter News Service formed in 1993, merging separate companies that counted votes and conducted exit polls. Networks were looking to work together to cut costs - pressures that are just as acute today.
The news organizations are considering entrusting the election night vote count to the AP, which has long conducted its own vote count separate from VNS, the network source said. Relying in part on its own numbers, the AP was the only consortium member not to declare Bush the winner in Florida early in the morning after the 2000 election.
Consortium members are also thinking about several alternatives for building a new exit poll operation.
The VNS board members, in a statement, said Monday they "are collectively reviewing a number of strong options for how to provide the tabulation of the national vote count as well as state and national exit polls for the 2004 election. An announcement will be forthcoming."
Time is of the essence for the news organizations, with the 2004 presidential primaries beginning in a year.
Time to speak up is NOW.....before it's too late.
Demand real time election results and no exit polling.
This whole paragraph is a lie. The VNS only once incorrectly called the winner of Florida and that was when they prematurely called it for Algore when the data had Dubya up by hundreds of thousands of votes. In fact, the data shows that Bush was never behind in the count.
Which leads me to the last sentence where the liberal Ap claims the Supreme Court gave Bush the win, but Bush was the one who had the electoral votes.
I remember when someone leaked the VNS numbers to Drudge the day before the Nov '98 election, and it took forever to report the results the next day because the election results had to be redone; however, some of the smaller elections were not changed and were the same as the day before with just a number changed. Yet, that wasn't proof?
However, the media turned it into a ratings grabber by trying to be the first network to call the election.
While I recognize the faults lying in sampling, I don't see a reason exit polling could not be conducted by a non-partisan group. This poll would also be restricted from public view until after ballots have been closed across the nation.
This creation of the media will just be transfigured into some other tool they'll manipulate as much as they possibly can.
They were receiving data from VNS, but it was the call of the news channels to call Florida early.
In addition to that, I know many of us recall the leap to call states for Gore as quickly as possible and waiting, sometimes hours, to call states for Bush that he won quite handily.
They pulled the same stunt this last November as we all waited for the results and the media announced the polling data was faulty:
But in the 2002 election, VNS was unable to provide its members and other clients with results from exit poll surveys.
I'll always suspect they couldn't believe the GOP success.
And Fox News Channel better get with the program and not follow in the footsteps of the Big Three and the pathetic CNN. Why did they join in the early call for Florida? Incompetence or the race to not be the last to report what all the other channels are saying? I don't think it plausible to tag Fox as part of the liberal media, but they had a hand in screwing up the calls.
There should be no cooperation between news organizations. The midterm election results were far fairer without VNS "data" to muck things up. They should go back to the old system, where each network paid for its own exit polling.
The ruminations of a true political junkie ;-)
I was also riveted and recognized that I would not know all the winners by bedtime(even here on the West Coast). This does not matter to me so much as getting things right.
Exit polls are fine and dandy provided the results are not released until after polls close. Party machines would be free to do their own exit polling (they do this in house now) but of course you could take their results with a grain of salt.
What I object to is leftists claiming that VNS was a safeguard to the democratic process when all it has been for the last 20 years or so is a ratings grabber creating a cottage industry in trends analysts making predictions on election night that turn out faulty more often than not.
My apologies to grammarians for the above run on sentence.
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