![]() His volunteers, unlike the rest of amateur and professional media alike, don't just rely on published figures and AP tallies. Now Finnigan and his ragtag Decision Desk have taken that transformation a step further. They typically reach a consensus about who will win long before the AP has made its once-definitive call, based on the same factors the AP looks at - the likelihood that the candidate who trails in the vote can close the gap with the outstanding votes, given both statistics and the voting history of the precincts waiting to be counted. They parse the results as they come in, they argue over what they mean, and sometimes they catch the sort of substantial errors - transposed digits, or uncounted ballots - that happen occasionally in preliminary election counts. And so a group of a couple dozen devoted journalists and partisans assemble on Twitter on Tuesday nights through the summer and fall to watch election returns, county by county, pop up on the websites of registrars and clerks. Now that same data that only the AP could access, anyone can access. The people counting the actual votes - county officials across the United States - have started putting precinct-by-precinct tallies online. The conversation has moved from polling to the polls. It really started with liberal bloggers who took polling seriously, and with the nerd king Nate Silver, who made his name reassuring Democrats that Barack Obama was, still, winning. ![]() The AP essentially controlled when Americans learned who won an election.īut something significant has changed in the last few years: The geeky new obsession with political data. The news wire neither rushes nor explains its decisions, which have been turned into a different kind of mysterious black box in part because it is bound contractually to share its results first with the news organizations who pay for those decisions. Virtually all other contests were "called" by only one entity: the AP. Their theatrical presentation and deliberate mystification turned their "analysts" - smart, numerate political hands with years of election experience - into a kind of political priesthood whose calls, particularly in the disputed 2000 election, were alleged to have shaped the outcome of a close race. Until about 2011, the way Americans received their information - who won, who lost - was dominated by the television networks. “I understand you need an element of suspense and you need something to jibber-jabber about on election night. His goal is both to modernize the local election boards and to deflate what he sees as false drama imposed by slow Associated Press calls and desperate television commentators. “I want to fundamentally change how results are reported,” Finnigan told BuzzFeed News. “Respect her for what she is, a shiftless rent-a-cooch from East Whoreville.”Īnd yet, politics is always surprising, and the eternal Washington consensus - that anything that’s good for democracy must come from the center - has not been borne out here.įinnigan - along with his dozens of volunteer Google spreadsheet jockeys - is the most ambitious face of a major and democratizing shift in the way Americans learn about the results of the most important elections in the country. The blog's motto is, “Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” Its founder’s scabrous style of parody has at times given offense: “Please don’t call Sandra Fluke a slut,” he tweeted (and later deleted) of the abortion rights advocate and liberal icon. Ace and his site’s mission has not, historically, been the sort of thing David Brooks gets excited about. Finnigan's second monitor, however, is for election results.īetween calls from drivers broken down in San Diego, and between visits from men there to drop off paperwork, he tracks election results for Ace of Spades HQ, a conservative blog run by an anonymous, combative figure known only as Ace. ![]() He manages the dispatching job on one computer monitor. ![]() Dripping sweat every day since the air conditioner broke, Finnigan is the sole employee of a small truck dispatching company where he pulls the noon-to-midnight shift. The Decision Desk swings into action on primary election nights, with Brandon Finnigan, a burly 29-year-old, nailed to a busted black leather armchair at one of those cheap beige aluminum desks, halfhearted fake wood top, toward the back of a low-slung house at a truck stop crossroads deep in California's monotonous Inland Empire. There was really no reason to think that the “Ace of Spades HQ Decision Desk” would be a hopeful sign for American democracy in 2014. ![]()
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