How do I spell relief?

[kaysho]

E-L-E-C-T-I-O-N.

Election Day, specifically!  You know, it's funny ... I used to be a political junkie.  Crossfire?  I was watching it.  Talking politics with my college friends every single day?  I was there.  I used to watch the stock market every day, too, and try to figure out the source of today's half-percent drop.

Then I realised, at some

Comments

[3catsjackson]

There were plenty of election results sites out there -- certainly all the major media sites (NPR, NYTimes, LATimes, Google News, and scads more) covered national, governors, and some major state races. Your local media outlets will likely have more on state and local races.

But there's a minor catch -- the votes have to be counted first, which is a Byzantine process that is amazing in that it gets done at all. And then the results have to get out, which in California's case is done via the Secretary of State's website.

On Election Night, that site crashed.

Granted, it's not uncommon for election traffic spikes to send small to medium sites crashing an burning when they get orders of magnitude beyond what they're normally architected and staffed for. But it's extra-special clusterfuck when it's the SoS site itself, because they're the official source feeding info to every other election results site. For several hours, all that was available was a PDF stuck at 19% of precincts reporting.

This was super-fantastic for newsrooms statewide, because every newsroom stays up late into the night to provide coverage of what is ultimately a series of events that they won't have very good answers for until the morning (or sometimes days or months later). But the audience is there wanting answers that don't exist yet, so there's a glut of dedicated airtime getting frantically filled with information-sparse theorizing and largely premature analysis.

Generally, I think the best media usage for election nights is catching up on new music or on any given Netflix queue. ;-)

[kaysho]

I do like how Election Night commentary has become increasingly like sportscaster babble. We have time to fill and we're paid to talk. Say something!

Oh, and the graphics are getting to be about as overdone and content-free as well. :)