House lawmakers may suggest uniform election poll closing time

Rep. Billy Tauzin

By Ian Christopher McCaleb
CNN.com/AllPolitics writer

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Several House Republican lawmakers, reviewing why the major TV news organizations botched Election Night calls in last year's presidential race, said Thursday they may suggest a uniform closing time for polling places across the country, among other electoral reforms.

The congressmen, members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, told reporters Thursday afternoon that results of an independent review of Election Night activity commissioned by CNN, and internal reviews conducted by ABC, CBS and Fox, pointed to several mistakes made as 2000's complicated Election Night unfolded.

NBC officials have yet to submit the results of its review, although they have produced a three-page summary, the lawmakers said.

At the root of many of those mistakes, the lawmakers said, was the consortium known as the Voter News Service, which is owned by the major networks and The Associated Press and crunches exit polls for its owners.

The news divisions routinely call state races for national office based on the polling data they receive from VNS.

VNS, according to committee Chairman Bill Tauzin, R-Louisiana, has for years operated on an modeling system that has not considered modern electoral realities.

Therefore, Tauzin said, VNS's polling numbers and modeling practices routinely skewed toward Democrats, though he insisted committee investigators have determined the "bias" was unintentional.

"If you combine the bad sampling at VNS and bad modeling, you consistently get an overabundance of Democratic votes and underabundance of Republican votes," Tauzin said. "VNS hasn't changed its models in 30 years. It has never been updated, it is clearly flawed, and it clearly produced biased reports."

On Election Night, November 7, CNN first called Florida for Democrat Al Gore, as did the other networks, only to later retract that projection. The initial call was made before polls had closed in the state's western Panhandle, which is in the Central time zone.

Most of Florida is situated in the Eastern time zone. When polls closed at 8 p.m., the networks called the election for Gore, while voters still had an hour to go to the polls in the Panhandle.

In the early morning hours after Election Night, with the outcomes still in doubt, CNN and the other networks called Florida for Republican George W. Bush -- a projection that resulted in wild celebrations at Bush headquarters in Austin, Texas.

The networks then retracted the call, and what followed was a protracted, 36-day legal dispute over which of the two major party candidates had taken the Sunshine State.

The models used by VNS to project races, Tauzin said, do not consider new realities such as mail-in ballots, or absentee and overseas ballots, which played a significant role in Florida, where Bush won ultimately by only a few hundred votes.

"The system of reporting election results while people are still voting can have significant impact," Tauzin said.

That, he said, coupled with the intense competition among the networks to be the first to call a winner in a presidential race -- while all networks work off the same data -- spelled danger for the democratic system.

"The networks are all using a single source, and they are using a single source that they own and control," Tauzin said.

The Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a hearing next Wednesday (February 14) on network Election Night practices. What happened in November 2000, Tauzin said, must be avoided.

"Finding a system that doesn't rely on competition is going to be one of the goals of the hearing," he said.

Scheduled to appear at the hearing are several independent assessors who probed how the networks made their Election Night calls. Also scheduled to appear are the top executives of every major domestic television network, save NBC's, who have not responded to the panel's invitation.

Lawmakers appearing with Tauzin speculated that a uniform poll closing time could make more accurate data available to everyone at once, and would keep voters from being discouraged from going to the polls if their candidate appears to be losing elsewhere.

"This is not a Democratic or Republican issue," said Rep. Christopher Cox, R-California. "It is about fairness and the way our system works."

"I hope hearings help us legislate, not in the form of content control, but in terms of election reform," Cox said.

Tauzin also suggested that Congress revisit a law drafted in the early 1980s that would have barred networks from calling state races until most polling places have closed. All polling places should be closed, he suggested, before the election in a state can be called by a news organization.

"This hearing we are going to conduct will be designed to ask the question, 'Can't we do a better job?'" he said.

CNN announced broad changes on Friday, February 2, in the way it will cover elections. The network said it will no longer rely on exit polls for projections in close races; it will install a key precinct cross-check reporting system; and it will not call races in states before all polls are closed in those states.

The changes came after a sweeping independent investigation, commissioned by the network, examined how CNN handled Election Night 2000.

"The final judgment of news quality is that CNN's election night coverage was a debacle," the report concluded. "In its coverage of the 2000 presidential election, television put too high a premium on timeliness and competition, to the detriment of accurate and responsible reporting of election night returns."

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