alchemicink (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
alchemicink) wrote2024-03-08 10:46 pm
alchemicink) wrote2024-03-08 10:46 pm
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Election night stringing
This probably doesn't interest anyone other than me, but I wanted to document the experience so I'll remember it. It's not particularly exciting, though I had a fun time.
I got the opportunity to string for the Associated Press (AP) on Primary Election night earlier this week.
(Stringing is newspaper jargon for freelancing)
For some background info, I live in rural North Carolina, and Tuesday was our Primary Election to whittle down the candidates who will be on the ballot in November. There were A LOT of races on the ballot, ranging from presidential preference all the way down to local government seats.
Anyway, AP hires stringers to gather the results on election night from each county's Board of Elections. Having as much data as possible is always good in journalism after all! So when the opportunity arose for me to do this for my home county, I immediately said yes. (It was a paid job lol, and I needed some extra money for groceries and gas)
The process itself was rather simple: You arrive at the Elections Office before the polls close (they close at 7:30 p.m. in NC) and then you call in the numbers to AP as they come in.
I got there about half an hour early, so I was able to sit in on the Board of Elections' meeting that was happening beforehand. (It's a public meeting.) They had to go over the absentee ballots received by mail. Only two absentee ballots were received on election day! Did I mention my county is very rural and we don't have a lot of people? 😂
I actually didn't know the process they use to handle absentee ballots, so that was a cool learning experience for me to watch. We use paper ballots in my county, and the absentee ballots that are mailed in must be transposed to a regular ballot so they can be fed into the tabulator like all the other ballots. So the board paired off (one Democrat and one Republican) to do that together and double check their work. It was an easy and smooth process. Neat!
But that wasn't really part of the AP stringing experience. It was just a bonus for me because I'm a nerd who enjoys sitting in on board meetings 😂
Anyway, once that meeting was done, they were finally ready to start going through the results as the chief judges from each precinct began to arrive at the office. I stayed out of the way in the meeting room, watching the results pop up online with a few other curious people. We had some competitive local races, so a few other local people came to see the results in real time too. A couple of the elections board members and poll workers would pop in occasionally to chat as well.
In between conversations, I took care of what I was supposed to do for AP. They'd given me a list of races to keep up with which included the federal races and all the state races, plus a few judicial races too. There were a TON of state races... All in all, my list was like six pages long.
So once the first vote totals came in (the early voting numbers), I made my first call into the AP election center, and then we went down the list, with me sharing the number of votes every single candidate had received at that point. Very tedious but not bad!
I repeated that twice more as the precincts kept updating until the results were completely in.
By the time it was finished, it was almost 11 p.m. 😅
And that was that! The work was easy, but what I really enjoyed was getting to chat with people while we waited. It's always exciting to see the numbers come in and try to guess at the final results. Will this candidate get enough to overcome the deficit? Will the voters in that precinct change who they usually support? I think we were all buzzing with excitement as we waited for the last two precincts to arrive. Locally, we had some unexpected results, so that was interesting to see as it happened in real time.
I'd definitely want to string again if I have the opportunity. With my regular job, I get to write about the local elections anyway, but this was a side of the process I'd never experienced before.
I got the opportunity to string for the Associated Press (AP) on Primary Election night earlier this week.
(Stringing is newspaper jargon for freelancing)
For some background info, I live in rural North Carolina, and Tuesday was our Primary Election to whittle down the candidates who will be on the ballot in November. There were A LOT of races on the ballot, ranging from presidential preference all the way down to local government seats.
Anyway, AP hires stringers to gather the results on election night from each county's Board of Elections. Having as much data as possible is always good in journalism after all! So when the opportunity arose for me to do this for my home county, I immediately said yes. (It was a paid job lol, and I needed some extra money for groceries and gas)
The process itself was rather simple: You arrive at the Elections Office before the polls close (they close at 7:30 p.m. in NC) and then you call in the numbers to AP as they come in.
I got there about half an hour early, so I was able to sit in on the Board of Elections' meeting that was happening beforehand. (It's a public meeting.) They had to go over the absentee ballots received by mail. Only two absentee ballots were received on election day! Did I mention my county is very rural and we don't have a lot of people? 😂
I actually didn't know the process they use to handle absentee ballots, so that was a cool learning experience for me to watch. We use paper ballots in my county, and the absentee ballots that are mailed in must be transposed to a regular ballot so they can be fed into the tabulator like all the other ballots. So the board paired off (one Democrat and one Republican) to do that together and double check their work. It was an easy and smooth process. Neat!
But that wasn't really part of the AP stringing experience. It was just a bonus for me because I'm a nerd who enjoys sitting in on board meetings 😂
Anyway, once that meeting was done, they were finally ready to start going through the results as the chief judges from each precinct began to arrive at the office. I stayed out of the way in the meeting room, watching the results pop up online with a few other curious people. We had some competitive local races, so a few other local people came to see the results in real time too. A couple of the elections board members and poll workers would pop in occasionally to chat as well.
In between conversations, I took care of what I was supposed to do for AP. They'd given me a list of races to keep up with which included the federal races and all the state races, plus a few judicial races too. There were a TON of state races... All in all, my list was like six pages long.
So once the first vote totals came in (the early voting numbers), I made my first call into the AP election center, and then we went down the list, with me sharing the number of votes every single candidate had received at that point. Very tedious but not bad!
I repeated that twice more as the precincts kept updating until the results were completely in.
By the time it was finished, it was almost 11 p.m. 😅
And that was that! The work was easy, but what I really enjoyed was getting to chat with people while we waited. It's always exciting to see the numbers come in and try to guess at the final results. Will this candidate get enough to overcome the deficit? Will the voters in that precinct change who they usually support? I think we were all buzzing with excitement as we waited for the last two precincts to arrive. Locally, we had some unexpected results, so that was interesting to see as it happened in real time.
I'd definitely want to string again if I have the opportunity. With my regular job, I get to write about the local elections anyway, but this was a side of the process I'd never experienced before.
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