Voters News Service: What Went Wrong

ddtstudio writes "Baseline Magazine has a pretty good recounting of how even the national TV networks can have a computer network go wrong -- in this case the night of the last U.S. election. From the article: "VNS had been trying to rewrite and retool the system for years. This was just the most recent attempt and it failed miserably." Oracle, IBM, BEA Systems -- all crashed."

Comments

Re:Oh BooHoo

[kmellis]

In the UK the media are not allowed to report any exit poll information until *after* the polls have closed, precisely in order to remove any possibility of the media influencing the votes of the populace. I'm very surprised that the same isn't true in the US.

Well, we have that pesky Constutional guarantee of "freedom of the press". You can ask people how they voted (why wouldn't you be able to, and why wouldn't they be able to tell you?), and you can tell other people what you find out.

This is a good example--of which there are many, many more--of a situation where the strict and broad Constitutional prohibition makes less sense than a nuanced and particular law tailored to the situation. It would be better if exit poll results could be suppressed.

The thing that non-USAians don't quite understand about the USA and USAians is that built into the very fabric of our culture is a paranoia about abuses of power by the government. (Periodic lapses into naive trust during wartime, like now, notwithstanding.) All of the Bill of Rights are built upon the same sort of slippery-slope thinking that the gun rights folks use in talking about the Second Amendment: if you cut holes into the brick wall of blanket protections, the government is sure to come barreling through and effectively destroying the whole barrier. How libertarian-minded conservatives can tolerate Ashcroft is beyond my limited ability to comprehend human irrationality.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that the reporting of exit poll data has been legally found to be protected speech in prior law. I could be wrong. A better answer is just to encourage a civic-minded sensibility among the news reporting agencies so that they voluntarily refuse to report exit poll data until after the polls close. Or even after all the polls close.