Give us the results of the exit polls
It is all about the exit polls:
Two-by-two, polling specialists from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News and the Associated Press will go into rooms in New York and Washington shortly before noon Tuesday. Their cellphones and BlackBerrys will be confiscated; proctors will monitor the doors; and for the next five hours, these experts will pore over exit-poll data from across the country.
If all goes well, only when they emerge from their cloisters will the legions of ravenous political bloggers have any chance of getting their hands on the earliest indication of which party will end up controlling Congress.
“The demand for info is intense, and if the safeguards aren’t steel doors bolting people inside a room, it will get out,” says Marc Ambinder, associate editor of National Journal’s Hotline OnCall. “The insatiable appetite for this info will overwhelm the ability to keep it secret.”
The extraordinary security is a result of mix-ups that prompted grumbling about the accuracy of exit polls after the 2004 presidential election: Bloggers posted data from early exit polls, incorrectly calling some states for Massachusetts Democratic Sen. John Kerry and indicating that he would unseat President Bush.
This year, media executives figure the secret will keep less than half an hour. “Based on past experience, I expect that I’ll have exit-poll data soon after it’s released from multiple sources,” Taegan Goddard of the newsy independent blog Political Wire says in an email.
More:
Consequently, for much of Tuesday, bloggers will likely be chattering mostly about secondary issues, such as voter turnout and problems with new electronic voting machines.
But at 5 p.m., waves of exit-poll data will begin flowing to newsrooms via limited-access Web sites. For the bloggers, the scramble will be on to get the data first, hoping for an email from a friendly source.
This is the first American election I am watching as closely as I am: I only started blogging this year, thus before I – being a foreigner – was not as obsessed with it as I am now. I had a lot to do today, but I tried to read blogs and newspapers in between classes. Bloggers are absolutely going crazy. Speculation, fear and hope rule the day.
It’s a crazy, yet great day.
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