Re: OT: Election technology question

From: Alan Winston - SSRL Central Computing (winston_at_SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU)
Date: 10/30/04 

Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 00:03:01 GMT

In article <4182BA87.CFBD490A@teksavvy.com>, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot@teksavvy.com> writes:
>DL Phillips wrote:
>> Here's a link to an Associated Press news release that addresses some
>> of your questions.
>>
>> <http://www.ap.org/pages/about/whatsnew/whatsnew.html>
>
>Thanks. So AP has people who are at the counting sites who call in the
>numbers. But the document still doesn't describe the interface between AP and
>the media organisations.
>
>There is an interesting paragraph about how their servers are built with lots
>of failover and fallback to different data centre. Sounds like a job of VMS.
>Does anyone know what technology they use for this ?
>
>I can understand why, no matter what OS, the manufacturer woudln't want to
>publicsize this since any voting problems would reflect badly (even if the
>problem is totally unrelated to the AP systems).
>
>Is it correct to state that there is no "official" national election office
>that tabulates the votes in an official manner and that the media is the one
>to actually decide which of the two will concede that night?

Or not. (This was a subject of - to put it mildly - some controversy in the
last Presidential election, what with some news organizations calling Florida
for one side, and another calling it for the other, triggering a possibly
premature concession which was then retracted...)

>
>Do the states officially declare the winner during the course of the evening,
>or does that take days before the official pronouncement is made ?

It depends; there may be enough challenges, recount demands, etc, etc, to
delay an official result. The state election agency has some length of time
(generally specified by the laws or Constitution of that state) to "certify
the election", which makes the result official and binding. So if it's
controversial enough, they'll go out to their deadline, but they have so far
usually called it the same night, and probably most states will call it the
same night this time.

-- Alan