THEY’ll be back.
Despite all the strong talk after last fall’s election-night debacle, the TV networks have decided to keep their membership in Voter News Service.
VNS is the much-maligned vote tabulating consortium funded by ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and the Associated Press, that was responsible for distributing the erroneous data the lead to TV news’ most embarrassing election night coverage ever.
The consortium had given themselves until June 1 to decide whether to remain in the group or opt out – and all the founding members have re-signed.
“We have confidence that the necessary steps are being taken to ensure the accuracy and reliability of VNS election night information,” NBC News spokeswoman Barbara Levin said.
After months of investigation, the solution some network officials say is: more money.
For the last year’s election VNS had an operating budget of about $33 million that was split evenly between its members, according to CNN’s post-mortem election report. The consortium also received and additional $2 million from other subscribers including local TV stations.
Topping the VNS fix-it list is replacing the old VNS mainframe computer system, including its software and the complex statistical models used to compute the results of voting polls.
The VNS computations from last November were based on models devised between 1967 and 1990, which didn’t account for the same levels of absentee voting, experts say.
Other augmentations will include mechanisms designed to catch data entry flubs.
In the last election, VNS was slow to correct a 20,000 vote error in Florida’s Volusia County that overstated George W. Bush’s lead over Al Gore.
Instead of having a race too close to call, the networks saw the inflated total and projected the state of Florida for Bush around 2:00 a.m. on election night.
At 2:51 a.m., VNS corrected the error and the networks were forced to make an about face.
Meanwhile, all of the networks have publicly committed to contributing more money to VNS, but have not yet decided on how much.
So far, the only concrete change that members have agreed on is to change the staffing of the VNS board of directors.
Before last year’s debacle, the board was composed of representatives from the units of each network that only covered elections. Now, network vice-presidents will sit on the board and set broad-based policies.
All VNS members initially projected last election night, Nov. 7, that Vice President Al Gore had won Florida, a key to winning the presidency. The news organizations later said Florida was too close to call, but early the next day five VNS members declared Bush the winner in Florida and nationwide.
What followed was five weeks of recounts and legal skirmishes and a host of internal studies at the networks to find out what went wrong.
At one point Fox and NBC even threatened not to renew their contracts with VNS unless the system was reformed in a way that would “ensure the accuracy and integrity of the data,” the findings of one internal investigation said.
