Behind the Curtain: Editor describes election-night planning

I've been around long enough to remember Y-2K.

Normally on New Year's Eve, our staff members are scattered to the winds and hopefully not embarrassing themselves in their revelry.

But as 1999 inched toward 2000, the newsroom was packed and everyone was working. No parties or revelry that year.

We all were monitoring events to be able to cover the crash if computer programs all over the globe failed to make the passage from one century to the next, as long had been feared.

There was advance planning and advance planning and advance planning, not only for the coverage but also for how, if the worst happened, we would get the paper printed after midnight.

And then something interesting happened: Nothing.

Midnight came, and everything worked.

All that planning, almost none of it needing to be executed. We didn't mind. We were glad of it.

This election season brings eerie reminders of that.

What if on election night, the results are so inconclusive - because of late-arriving mail-in and provisional ballots, further confused by ominous threats of endless legal battles over the results - that we can't call a single race?

Well, I don't think something that extreme is likely. There will be outcomes that are clear.

But there are likely to be more races that are up in the air than normal. Perhaps a lot more. Maybe even most of them.

This possibly may be true in even the bigger elections, the presidential race and almost certainly in the referendum for a graduated income tax amendment.

So we've been planning. And replanning. And preparing. And of course, deliberating. (A lot of deliberating and second guessing.)

As part of that, the print editions of the paper probably will look different from our normal morning-after election editions.

Normally, those editions are filled with myriad stories on individual races.

This election, we will still be posting those on dailyherald.com as information becomes relevant.

But because of the uncertainty, we will do something different in print. There, we will wrap similar races together in lengthier stories that will enable us to focus on races where meaningful information is available and minimize the attention we give to races where the outcomes are wildly unclear.

Did I mention that there's also been a lot of worrying going on? There has been. And of course, some worrying can provide motivation.

But too much worrying is unhealthy.

For the big races, we're backed by The Associated Press, which has a tradition of accuracy and excellence in reporting election results. If AP calls a race, you can trust that the race is over.

And we'll exercise good judgment ourselves.

When we were hand-wringing about this the other day, one of our reporters, Russell Lissau, piped up and said - accurately - that this really isn't all that complicated.

"We will do what we always do," Lissau said. "We report what we know and point out what we don't know. If we do that, there shouldn't be a problem."

Exactly.