All eyes on US TV networks for ‘high stakes’ election night

NEW YORK: Facing a results vacuum that could grind on for weeks, US TV networks are preparing to fill the airwaves against a backdrop of unprecedented pressure to avoid mistakes and a torrent of disinformation.

In 2020, it took four tense days for President Joe Biden´s victory to be announced. This year, experts and observers will once again be waiting for the jigsaw puzzle of states to be declared for the Democrats or the Republicans one by one, and with them their electoral college votes, 270 of which are needed to win.

“It´s all going to come down to seven really competitive swing states, and in a lot of those states, we´re not going to have sufficient data to make a projection until either late that evening, early the next day, or in some cases, it might be days after the election,” said Joe Lenski, executive vice president of Edison Research. His organisation will produce exit polls, projections and vote counts for the ABC, CBS, NBC News and CNN networks.

In addition to a complex electoral system, the voting and counting procedures differ between regions. Lenski points to Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, two key swing states, that do not start counting early votes until Election Day on November 5.

With no official results for weeks, it falls to the TV news networks to call states for either former president Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris. Behind the swish TV studios, the real pressure will not be on presenters and pundits, but on the network decision desks, teams of statisticians and analysts who will feed anchors with estimates based on the patchy first results.

“The stakes are very high... there is tremendous pressure to capture viewers by giving them information as quickly as it is available, but the greatest risk is sacrificing accuracy for speed,” said Costas Panagopoulos, a political science professor at Northeastern University and 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 struck a body blow to Trump´s chances by calling Arizona for Biden. The announcement, confirmed several days later by other media, infuriated the Trump camp. Maybe most notorious was the U-turn networks made in 2000 after Florida was prematurely called for Democratic contender Al Gore.