Election Problems, What Election Problems?

The Media Narrative and Public Perception

If you watched the cable news coverage on Election Night it was easy to come away with the impression that few problems were experienced with electronic voting - the predicted ‘train wreck’ had not materialized. But out in the real world, the HAVA mandated changeover of voting systems resulted in real failures that resulted in long lines and lost votes. Just like the fancy new high tech voting machines, the mainstream media has failed us yet again.

That there were widespread problems with electronic voting equipment all around the country is well documented. Thousands of citizens took part in a first time nation-wide effort monitoring polling sites and reporting problems. The reports are still coming in, but it’s clear that hundreds and hundreds of problems occurred. But the mainstream media has thus far barely mentioned this, leading one to ask what vast scale of voting disaster would it actually take for the media to report on it?

The Election Night Narrative

News organizations used to report the news, but nowadays they’re more concerned with telling their viewers a story. This story, the theme of the day as it were, is called the ‘narrative’. On Election Night 2006, the media narrative was “The Great Tsunami”. The story was about the Democratic tide as it moved from East to West, sweeping away Congress in its path. As soon as the first totals started coming in from the East Coast the news networks started framing everything solely in the context of this narrative. There was no room here for voting machines failures, long lines of voters, or anything else. The story was about the horse race, about devastating loss, about the great wave sweeping across the nation. Voting machine problems had no place here as they would distract from the narrative, even worse, maybe even undermine it. Raising the possibility that votes were lost? How are you going to sell soap with that?

The Unspoken Narrative

Underlying the Great Tsunami story was a subtler narrative, one that the media has consistently fed us on Election Nights for years. This narrative is expressed by the often repeated mantra “Even if there were problems, it wasn’t enough to affect the outcome of the election.” It seems vitally important to the media that the public believe that no matter what, no matter how bad the problems, no matter how many lost votes and machine breakdowns, the results are still basically correct, your vote still counts, or at least close enough.

We’ve been told this story before, in 2000, in 2004, and now again in 2006. Nothing to worry about folks, just a little glitch, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. This seems to be an essential narrative for the media, one that we must be told and reminded of each and every Election Day. Because imagine what would happen if the media told the public the real story, and showed the real impact on real voters. Why, you might not have just thousands of activists around the country demanding change, you might have hundreds of thousands. If the real story about broken voting machines and lost votes got out, you might even have millions. Imagine, millions of citizens demanding that their right to vote is sacred and not for sale to voting machine vendors, demanding real accountability, demanding accurate elections with results that we can have real confidence in.

Now that would be a tsunami.