What TV viewers should know about following election night returns

Whether it was CNN beaming holograms of its far-flung correspondents onto the set, or Dan Rather's folksy play-by-play ("This race is shakier than cafeteria Jello"), election night was once an occasion that TV news greeted with giddy, self-promoting flair.

Not this year.

Amid projected historic turnout - and historic national anxiety - media organizations plan to strike a more somber, deliberate tone. They will contend with staffs dispersed by the coronavirus shutdown, ballot-counting rituals upended by a tsunami of early and mail-in votes, and a polarized climate in which President Donald Trump has attempted to sow doubt about the integrity of the process. In conversations over the past week, top officials at ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News and The Associated Press answered our questions about following the election results with them this year.

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Should viewers expect to have a result of the election on Nov. 4?

Nobody knows, and news executives say they are prepared for the potential of the count going on well into the next day - or beyond. "Obviously, there's a strong possibility that we won't be able to project the winner" on Tuesday, said James Goldston, ABC News president. News directors say they have run dress rehearsals with their data scientists, statisticians and on-air talent to prepare for every eventuality of how election night might unfold - and now, says CBS News President Susan Zirinsky, "we have to prepare the audience: It may not be over that night, it may take days." Which is why "we have no illusion of going off the air," said Marc Burstein, a senior executive producer at ABC. "We've told everybody not to plan on going home, and then we'll come back to do it on Wednesday and Thursday and Friday."

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What's changed since the last presidential election?

Many television news anchors appeared visibly shocked on election night 2016 as the vote tallies that would propel Donald Trump into the White House rolled in from across the country. That misreading chastened the whole industry. This year, "we aren't going in with any narrative or set of expectations," said Noah Oppenheim, president of NBC News. "We are going to talk about the facts and not get ahead of them." To remind his staff to be cautious and prepared, CNN Washington bureau chief Sam Feist distributed copies of the testimony news executives gave to Congress when they were called to explain how the television networks got things so wrong in 2000 - the night they called Florida for Gore, then for Bush, then realized it was too close to call.

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How will the networks get their information on how the vote is going throughout the night?

As they have for nearly two decades, the big three broadcast networks and CNN will join as the National Election Pool to share data collected by a firm called Edison Research, which conducts exit polls - via both in-person and phone surveys of people who have already voted - to anticipate the trends within this year's electorate. While "a handful of people at each network" will be permitted to review the exit-poll data during the day, they will not be allowed to report it until 5 p.m. Tuesday, said Edison executive Joe Lenski. Edison also will collect the actual vote tallies from across the country as they are released by local jurisdictions.

But Fox News and the AP left the pool after 2016 and have struck out together, hiring a research operation affiliated with the University of Chicago to help them prepare their projections. Arnon Mishkin, head of Fox's decision desk, said his organization was disappointed with 2016's exit polling, which skewed the results by capturing a disproportionate number of younger and college-educated voters - many of whom lean Democratic - and didn't fully probe the voting sentiment of mail-in and early voters. What this means is that for the first time since 1988, you'll see not one but two different polls of the electorate as you flip the channels.

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How will the huge number of mail-in votes affect election night coverage?

In past years, viewers were accustomed to hearing reports about the growing vote tally, tracked by the "percentage of precincts reporting," which enhanced the illusion of a steadily moving horse race. But what goes on in the precincts is more abstract this year, thanks to the large number of mail-in votes - many of which won't be calculated until after the in-person vote. So news executives promise they will explain the vote tally in its full context at every step. "You'll hear about Election Day in-person voting. You will hear about preelection in-person voting. And you will hear about mail-in voting," said David Chalian, CNN's political director. Those distinctions are important, networks say, because each cohort is expected to skew in different directions. Expect to hear television anchors to frame the results in terms of "percentage of the expected vote" instead of the "percentage of precincts reporting."

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What's this talk about a "red mirage" or a "blue mirage"?

Preelection opinion surveys have showed that this year, Democrats have a much greater propensity to vote by mail than Republicans. So depending on when a state plans to tally its mail-in ballots, there could be big swerves in the results throughout the evening. "We have to explain to the viewer what we know about those vote totals, because it could help them understand why a state may appear red initially on the map, but we believe that it may shift blue and that you shouldn't be surprised by that and vice versa," said Chalian. For example, said Fox News's Mishkin, there are two states where people are most likely to "draw inappropriate conclusions" - Florida, which will count its early votes first, possibly making it seem deceptively blue in the early hours, and Pennsylvania, where Election Day votes are counted first, possibly making it seem deceptively red until all the early and mail-in ballots are cast.

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Why does it even matter what the networks project on election night?

In 1980, NBC News used exit polling data to call the state of California for Ronald Reagan early in the evening, and Jimmy Carter conceded the election before the state's polls had closed, which hurt other Democratic candidates in the Pacific time zone when those voters didn't bother to show up. In 2000, based on vote and polling information from a now-abandoned research firm, the networks made the premature botched calls about Florida. The Associated Press was notably alone in saying it could not make a call based on the vote that night. But the contradictory calls on network television helped fuel confusion through the ensuing recount. This year, "being right is of absolute importance, and being first is less so," said Oppenheim. "We have a tremendous responsibility election night and this year more than ever. Everything we report needs to be bulletproof."

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How will the networks call the race?

The anchors may be the voice of authority in delivering the news, but it's not up to them to make the call. Each network relies on an in-house staff typically called a "decision desk" - a cadre of experts in data science and political science who look at historical voting patterns and compare them to real-time data as the vote comes in. They sit apart from the anchors and analysts you see on air. In 2012, when guest commentator Karl Rove disputed Fox's decision to call Ohio for Barack Obama, then-anchor Megyn Kelly had the cameras follow her down the hall to get Mishkin to explain his projections. Mishkin stood his ground and was soon proved right.

(All the networks tout the independence of their decision desks, but in 2000, Fox's was run by John Ellis, who spent time on the phone that night sharing observations with his cousins - then-candidate George W. Bush and then-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush - and prematurely called Florida for Bush even before the other networks. Fox says that its present-day decision desk doesn't have contact with campaigns.)

This year, expect the announcements to come with a dose of math homework, as news organizations plan to show their work. "Every time we call a state for one of the two candidates, we are going to do a small but robust piece of explanatory journalism that we will put out as fast as possible to explain why the AP called that race," said Associated Press Executive Editor Sally Buzbee. "This isn't magic. It's math and analysis." And editors are vowing a "99.5% certainty" behind each call. "We do not call a race until we are absolutely sure that there is no way the trailing candidate can catch up," added Buzbee. One added potential for drama is the somewhat different data that AP and Fox will be working with, apart from the National Election Pool networks, since the two sets of pollsters will work with different sets of questions. "The public will be well-served by the fact that there are two entities conducting that poll," Mishkin said.

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What will the media do if Trump attempts to declare victory prematurely, as some have speculated he might?

Network executives did not explicitly say whether they would air such a speech or not; instead, they promise to report the most accurate news about what's going on, no matter what one of the candidates says. "Our job is to bring facts and context to those facts on election night," said CNN's Chalian. "Votes are facts. If someone declares victory prior to receiving 270 electoral votes and prior to CNN being able to project a winner, we will make sure to make those facts clear to the audience as we do each and every day."

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How are the networks going to fill all those hours if the vote takes a long time?

It's possible that you'll be watching the equivalent of a televised civics class. This year, you can expect the news to go deep on the processes behind mail-in voting, the mechanics of the electoral college, what happens in the case of a tie, the expectations for a peaceful transfer of power and so forth. And as they deliver news, they promise they'll do everything they can to explain where it came from, how they got it, and what it means.

"When the hour comes, and the polls close, we are going to characterize every state that has closed: likely, leaning tossup, late-in-the night call," said Zirinsky of CBS. "But what we have to maintain very clearly to the audience is what we know, how we know it. We're educating the public on how we are making this assessment."