Last week I watched the US Elections at a bar with a few friends. The bar supplied me with Dark and Stormies* throughout the long evening. It’s been my official election night cocktail since 2004.
To pass the time between the various states poll closing times, we listened to typical election banter from the CNN newscasters about vote tallies in states and counties, how current results compared with 2012 results, etc. Initially, I enjoyed the real-time, instant reporting. I appreciated watching the newscasters seamlessly toggle between the 2016 and 2012 results as tallies were updated. I loved how the newscasters could move around the US map and easily zoom in on a particular area to give us details about a specific county.
And then, it just went on and on and on. Around 10pm, after watching the election for a couple of hours, I felt fatigued and bored with the coverage. Every few minutes we were inundated with a loud blaring noise from CNN announcing a NEW Key Race Alert!! Each time this happened I felt a surge of stress and adrenaline. I quickly grew bored of the discussions about who had votes where, how many each needed to win, and the comparisons with the 2012 election.
Every discussion was the same, except with the state and/or county names changed. I wanted to hear something new or different, instead of the same formulaic points made over and over and over….Since everything was reported in RT**, we got “updates” from states with only a small percentage of votes counted. I would’ve preferred to wait until a state had counted at least 50% of the votes to get an update. I felt overloaded and burdened with too much information.
At some point during the night I started to think about how we used to watch the elections before it was broadcast in RT with incessant updates every time a vote was counted. What did we use to do for those hours in between the polls closing when we had to wait for results?
As a side note, with all the new technological advances and RT reporting, I couldn’t help but wonder why it took New Hampshire so long to count their votes. One would think that such a small state would be able to produce results faster, even if they had to count paper ballots by hand.
*ginger beer and dark rum
**Real Time