Count the ways technology has shaped elections
TheStar.com - Count the ways technology has shaped elections
One of the Internet's best uses getting
local results fast
M. COREY GOLDMAN
FORWARD
As with John F. Kennedy's narrow victory over Richard Nixon in 1960, Jimmy Carter's slim triumph over Gerald Ford in 1976 and George W. Bush's Supreme Court-decided win over Al Gore in 2000, the winner of tomorrow's U.S. presidential election likely won't be known until after every single ballot has been counted and accounted for.
Possibly twice, depending on how things go. What will be known instantaneously and constantly from the time the polls close and as each vote is counted is the election results in each region, state, municipality and town, thanks to the media and technology now at people's disposal.
Television is the obvious one, with U.S. networks planning night-long coverage with electronic maps showing who is getting the votes, where.
U.S. local stations will cover the goings-on in their own neck of the woods, as will some radio stations.
But the real place to see what's going on, especially on a local level, will be the Internet — the only medium to date where a person can steer themselves to what they want to see, read, listen to, and where they can parse about the political process at their leisure.
It's worth noting just how much technology has changed the way elections are held and how the results are released to the public.
Before 1920, presidential elections involved putting up posters, passing out flyers and having the respective candidates do whistle stops in every city, town and hamlet to meet the voting public and belt their message out over a megaphone and in print-media reports.
That changed with the invention of radio, where for the first time a politician could reach out to masses of people by simply sitting down and speaking into a microphone.
The first U.S. radio station to broadcast election returns was KDKA in Pittsburgh, whose broadcasters in 1920 read out results that were phoned in to the studio from the Pittsburgh Post newsroom as they came off the wire services.
Live banjo music filled the empty spaces. Listeners were few. But within a few years radio had taken off, with thousands, then millions of receiving sets getting a signal. Not only were elections themselves listened to en masse, party conventions and political speeches drew huge audiences.
Television married images to voices and over the years election night coverage got increasingly sophisticated. Live coverage of election results and networks declaring winners based on still-incomplete vote tallies became a staple of the broadcast age.
But the non-interactiveness of TV — the fact that it still only provides what those behind the camera and in the studio subjectively show — meant people couldn't choose what they wanted to see on election night, check how a particular politician was doing, or see whether an obscure judge got re-elected.
The Internet changed all that. Tomorrow, folks in Vermont will be able to turn on their computers and, at leisure, checkWeb sites to see who's winning in their neck of the woods rather than waiting for a network to cut to the local coverage or briefly flash the local news across the national tube.
And voters in Oregon will be able to surf the Web all day to get a sense of which states three hours ahead out east will be designated Bush or Kerry country, giving them valuable information when they decide to head out to the polls and cast their own votes.
But some of the same questions that plagued radio, and then television, plague the Internet: How do we know the votes are being tallied correctly? How do we know the numbers we're seeing are legit? How do we trust the source that is posting the information?
It is those same questions that have so far prevented the U.S. and other countries, including this one, from taking the voting process itself the next technological step: having people cast their ballots online with some sort of electronic pass code and a click of the mouse.
In the U.S., there is good reason to be suspicious of ways technology could be harnessed in service of fraud. Mary Poppins and Dick Tracy are among a large cast of fictional characters who reportedly tried to register electronically to vote tomorrow.
Many states are already facing legal challenges over possible voting problems arising from registration issues, questions about touch-screen voting machines, and concerns about voters being wrongly validated.
Despite the pains and grumblings and myriad ways votes will be counted in all 50 states tomorrow, one thing is clear: Technology will play a role in both how the process gets done and how it's viewed, reviewed and analyzed by Americans and the world.
If there is a certainty, it's that in four years' time, technology will play an even bigger role in the U.S. elections than it will tomorrow.
And quite likely it will, too, in Canada, where a federal election has come and gone in a fraction of the time it's taken for the U.S. election to reach the finish line — without any legal challenges or fraud-tainted incidents or contentious concerns about technology.
I, for one, will be watching the results of the New York race very closely tomorrow.
From my laptop.
I may even post a comment to that other, interactive Internet phenomenon, a blog.
November 1, 2004 at 07:56 AM in Politics | Permalink
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