The election night of November 3, an unprecedented challenge for American TVs

The channels all have in mind November 7, 2000 and the about-face that had to be done after the premature announcement of a victory for Democrat Al Gore in the decisive state of Florida. A nightmare for their credibility.

As in every election, the pressure will be on the "decision desks", teams of statisticians and analysts assembled by each major channel and who feed the antenna with estimates and results.

For a long time, these teams relied mainly on exit polls to project a winner with reliability.

But "this is no longer the case," warns Costas Panagopoulos, professor of political science at Northeastern University, who works with the teams of the NBC channel. Because according to most estimates, at least half of voters will have already expressed themselves before election day, against around 14% in 2000.

Votes by mail or in advance in person, which were already gaining popularity before the pandemic, have been accelerated by the health context.

“We're ready to count for days, even weeks. This is what we did for the primaries, ”announces Joe Lenski, managing director of Edison Research, which provides channels ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN with polls, projections and counts, the raw material for their“ decision desks ”.

Joe Lenski, who will have 3,000 people mobilized on November 3, recalls that several states, including the key states of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, cannot legally begin counting early votes before election day.

“Will the American media announce the correct winner on election night? Don't count on it, ”wrote in a column for the Guardian, several former presidents of the American Political Science Association.

"Despite the uncertainty associated with a large number of bulletins, the media will compete to give the result and grab the attention of viewers on election night," they worry.

"We are not racing," said Sam Feist, chief of the Washington bureau of CNN, during a round table organized by the association PEN America. “It would be counterproductive for all of us. We know we have to wait for the numbers to come out. "

"Be transparent"

Big boss of the Fox News desk, Arnon Mishkin knows that during the evening, statements could be made on the provisional results, by one or the other campaign team, "which would complicate our lives", a he said during the round table.

In such a case, "you focus on what the numbers show," without listening to the noise in the media, he says.

Vanita Gupta, president of the human rights association Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, has even publicly expressed concern that Fox News, the most watched news channel in the United States and with a conservative lean, is giving in to Trump team and prematurely announce a victory.

"The integrity of our desk is flawless," Fox News told AFP, which since 2018 has had its own statistical system, designed in collaboration with the Associated Press agency.

Like the platform designed by Edison Research, the channel has integrated into its models extensive surveys of voters who voted in advance, a necessity this year especially since these ballots are geared massively towards the Democratic candidate Joe Biden.

Despite these efforts, the channels are aware that this pandemic election comes against a background of growing mistrust of the media, and after months of statements by the Trump camp about the supposed - but never documented - risk of advance poll fraud.

In this context, mainstream media in general all have "an obligation to be transparent" and educational, according to Sam Feist.

“If there is no winner on election night, that doesn't mean something is wrong,” he said.

"Not all elections give their result on polling night, even in normal times", echoes Joe Lenski, who recalls that in 2004, George Bush was not declared the winner until the day after the election.

“This year,” he said, “it's going to take even more patience. "