Thursday, November 06, 2008 Seares: Projecting the winner By Pachico A. Seares News Sense
AT 11 p.m. yesterday (US time), all the American news networks projected Barack Obama the winner, Brian Williams of NBC more stirringly, thus: "An African-American has broken the barrier as old as the republic."
From exit polls, historical voting, and real voting, the networks saw Obama piling more electoral votes than he needed. But the networks were cautious.
The US practice of projecting the winner even before all the votes are in can be controversial.
There is always some agonizing as to when a network must call. It doesn't want to pretend it doesn't know how the election ends and yet it can't be rash and fall flat on its face when it errs. Flip-flopping on the calls for Bush and Gore in Florida in 2000 still hurts.
"Misleading"
In our country, merely reporting voting trends invites virulent attack by the party or candidate trailing in votes.
A Cebu politician used to shout expletives at Comelec registrars for tallying votes coming from enemy turf and setting a "misleading" trend.
Projecting winners is still not the thing in this country. One reason is the slow vote count. If American founding fathers didn't foresee that their election system would come to count so fast, framers of the Philippine Constitution never thought our Comelec would take forever to count.
Our politicians suspect as tainted poll surveys they don't control or influence. Each assumes the other will steal the election and projecting the winner "conditions" the public mind of cheating to come.
No, we won't be announcing our next president before voters go to bed on election day 2010. Let’s not even think about it.
