Late night election reveals secrets

Through Murky Waters

Tuesday night’s media coverage of the presidential election was simply stunning.

Sequestered away at The Breeze offices, the election became a challenge between CNN, Sen. John Kerry and I to see who would be the first to acknowledge the election was over. I lost, saluting Bush as president for a second term at 4 a.m. Kerry followed me with an 11 a.m. call to the White House. CNN was the last to give the election up for lost — when I checked at 12 p.m., Ohio — the key state in this election — was still "too close to call." There was a time when I wasn’t sure who was waiting on whom — I didn’t think Kerry would call it quits until CNN did.

Election night was full of expected occurrences, including CNN’s and Fox News’ competing spins. In contrast to CNN’s remarkable delay in reporting Ohio, Fox News had safely filed it away for Bush at 12:30 a.m. It was a head-shaking moment — it’s alarming to be so blatantly confronted with overt media bias. CNN did claim to be waiting for complete information, but a 100,000 vote lead with 92 percent of precincts reporting was fairly convincing evidence. To be fair, it would have been far worse to make an incorrect, premature call.

Also as unsurprising and as pathetic as the media’s agendas was the lack of the youth vote. For whatever reason, the much sought-after vote of college-age students showed no increase from the last election. Although P. Diddy tried with his "Vote or Die!" and votorgasm.com tried with their less-conventional drive, it is tragically hard to sell voting as a counter-culture movement.

This probably resulted in perspective voters simply skipping straight to the after-parties without bothering to fill out those absentee ballots. Unfortunately, the youth have to live the longest with whatever mistakes are made today and with life expectancies nearing 100 years, they better start taking some interest in ensuring that less are made.

The only real surprise was the one mistake that was not made — the election is decidedly over after only one 30-hour Election Day. Kerry deserves to be commended for conceding with honor when it became apparent that, after all ballots were counted once, he had not won. Granted, his decision was made easier by the 3.5 million popular votes by which Bush passed him — compared to Al Gore’s victory in the popular vote in 2000.

Last night’s results left a mildly alarming impression of democracy — ballot troubles, polling inefficiency and trigger-happy lawyers waiting to challenge all the absentee ballots from college students who didn’t vote didn’t inspire confidence.

The global implications of our inability to run an election that meets the standards of one poor columnist are many and run much deeper than any partisan bickering and is one of the challenges our president will face in the next four years. For now, however, I wish him the best of luck and hope that, when all is said and done, he keeps supplying us with those adorable malapropisms.

Alex Sirney is a sophomore SMAD/Anthropology major.