Counting the Votes

In TV news, CBS usually tops NBC--but last week the networks divided honors. On CBS, Commentator Ed Murrow and Political Analyst Sam Lubell made the most sense as the confusing election returns mounted. But NBC scored with such new techniques as the split screen that let four reporters from as many cities talk to each other (and the viewers) at the same time. In a post-midnight phone call, Vice President Richard Nixon praised NBC for "objective reporting" and for "the finest election coverage I have ever seen."

NBC's regional roundups were more effective than the general CBS coverage. CBS's news desk overscreened its commentators, leaving them time and again with little to say that they had not said half an hour earlier. On CBS it sometimes appeared that there were more commercials (for Roto-Broil and Prestone) than election returns.

Probably the outstanding TV casualty of the night was Univac--the giant electronic brain built by Remington Rand and used by CBS to project early returns into estimates of final results. Everybody remembers how Univac predicted a Republican landslide early in the 1952 presidential election and how CBS kept the prediction dark. As a result, Univac was scooped by the returns themselves.

Last week, possibly in revenge, Univac turned Democrat with a vengeance and predicted a Republican disaster: shortly after 9 p.m., Univac claimed that the Democrats would win a majority of 64 seats in the House and 23 in the Senate.

But two hours later the machine completely reversed its field. Commentator Charles Collingwood, who nursemaided the mechanical brain both in 1952 and last week, says: "Suddenly Univac said the Republicans were winning the House. We didn't know what to do. Should we change the machine? After all, last time the experts were wrong. I decided to stick with the machine." This particular error turned out to be caused by human frailty: a teletype operator had transposed the Democratic and Republican figures.

As for Univac's mistaken idea that a Democratic sweep was in the making, Collingwood thinks it resulted from the fact that the first two states to report--Delaware and Connecticut--showed a heavier Democratic vote than was true of the national scene. Explains Collingwood, defensively: "After all, Univac is only human--that is, it can only make predictions based on the material that humans feed into it." Collingwood asked an attendant mathematician if he could explain what went wrong, and got the Einsteinian answer: "It may be in the taxability of the K factor."

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