November 7, 2002
Many Questions on the Day After a Technology Fiasco
By JIM RUTENBERG
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/07/politics/campaigns/07VNS.html?todaysheadli
nes
The New York Times

Network news executives spent yesterday trying to find out why their
vote-tabulation system was so plagued with problems on Tuesday and, more
important, whether it would be in better shape by the 2004 presidential
election.
Executives who oversee the system, the Voter News Service, were still unsure
whether it would be able to answer critical questions about this election -
how President Bush's popularity affected the Hispanic vote, how the economic
outlook swayed outcomes, how much the prospect of war with Iraq came into
play.
Those answers were supposed to be available on Tuesday night. They were not
because of extensive problems with the system, which is the primary source
of voter information for the major news organizations.
The problems greatly slowed the reporting of results in several races, and
they left political analysts little on which to base their comments about
national voting patterns.
While executives at the news organizations that jointly run the system -
NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News Channel and The Associated Press - said they
were deeply disappointed in its performance, they stopped short of saying
that they would dismantle it or pull out of it.
"We're taking a hard look at what happened last night," said Jeffrey
Schneider, an ABC News spokesman. "Based on what we find out, we'll assess
our position in the consortium going forward."
Ted Savaglio, the former CBS News producer who is executive director of
Voter News Service, has been asked by his board to give a full report next
week.
Though details remained sketchy, it was clear yesterday that the system
nearly collapsed because of several factors, among them the volume of
information being fed into its main computer, a series of technological
flaws in the system and a canvassing force that was not as diligent as it
might have been.
The system is at the two-year mark of a four-year rehabilitation. That
refurbishment was scheduled even before the 2000 presidential election, when
the service's data problems helped lead the networks to declare Al Gore,
then George W. Bush, the victor in Florida, 36 days before a real winner was
determined.
The refurbishment required a new computer system and new software, estimated
to cost $8 million to $12 million. All of it was supposed to be in working
order well before Tuesday.
By last week it was clear that technical problems might jeopardize the
service's ability to produce an Election Day poll of voting trends.
Still, as testing of the system continued through the weekend, officials at
the service said they were confident they would provide specific data on
voter motivations in the most contested states. They kept voicing confidence
until Tuesday morning.
But the testing apparently could not predict the problems the system
encountered in the actual election, when more than 1,000 of its workers
reported opinion poll results and vote tallies throughout the country, often
at the same time.
Telephone operators taking their results seemed overwhelmed at times.
(Technical problems barred extensive use of a computerized telephone
system.) Some poll takers, hired as temporary workers, apparently did not
did not even show up at designated precincts.
"What went wrong yesterday started in the polling places," said John Gorman,
the head election night analyst for Fox News Channel. "Where we were
expecting 40 precincts to report, we'd have 23 or 25."
The data collected was not always properly entered into the main computer
system, he said.
In an interview yesterday, Mr. Savaglio said problems also arose when
operators taking down answers tried to enter the information. For no
immediately apparent reason, he said, the computer would not accept all of
the data.
By midafternoon it became apparent to analysts at the service that such
problems were contributing to flawed results.
Executives at two networks said they heard that at one point some poll
workers left precincts in frustration when they could not get through to the
service's operators.
Mr. Savaglio said he could not confirm that. He said that later in the day
the service gave up taking questionnaire data and directed its workers at
the precincts to instead concentrate on how people voted, further limiting
the available data.
The service is collecting the hard copies of the questionnaires from the
poll workers for a possible new analysis of poll answers. "The way that
works is the people who conduct the polls keep the questionnaires and mail
them back," Mr. Savaglio said. "And that process is under way."
But the service had trouble even with its minimum function of reporting the
actual vote. Its servers were overloaded by data coming in from many states
and counties, and the system crashed several times during the evening,
several executives said.
What remains unclear is how much of this can be improved, and whether the
system will remain troubled through 2004. "It's obviously a question that
everybody who's chipped into this wants answered," said John Moody, senior
vice president of the Fox News Channel.

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