When the Miraculous Computer Fails - 8 November 2002

Many years ago about this time of year, just before an American election, and like this year a so-called mid-term election - a congressional not a presidential year - I had a letter from an Englishman of I'm sure a now-vanished type.

I guessed his character from the style and tone of the letter and the county address that sounded like a Wodehouse invention - say, Dripping Lodge, Titchville, Upper Draining on the Marsh.

And the picture that came to mind was one of my favourite characters in the whole of fiction - the incomparable Galahad Threepwood, first described as "a dapper man in his 50s in a small checked coat, tight trousers and a grey bowler hat with racing glasses bumping against his left hip - his bright eyes watching them rounding into the straight, his neatly shod foot seeming to paw in search of a brass rail."

The letter began: "My dear fellow (if I may make so bold) please do us the kindness of not going on about the coming American election.

"It's hopelessly incomprehensible to us.

"Bad enough having to follow our standard form of chess but in yours the pawns move backwards, the bishops seem to move in any direction they choose and there's no king or queen.

"My dear chap I think we'd be grateful with your telling us just the gist and if there are two gists then bung along both of them.

"Forgive my rude intrusion on your most admirable weekly chore and if I may give my compliments to your lady wife."

I'm sure old Galahad spoke for many more than Britons and for many other types.

I shall do my best to oblige and tell you why a gist this time may be hard to come by due to the towering crash of a new, all-powerful computer system that left us with only the hunches and the pundits instead of the certainties that were meant to replace them.

First though I must pay homage to the political parties that never get mentioned: the 31 (31 political parties!) apart from the Democrats and the Republicans.

Their existence reveals a fairly substantial minority of people who have a bee in their bonnet, who are obsessed with one issue - replacing fossil fuels by next year, preserving the spotted owl, making women belong to men's clubs that don't want them, the return of prohibition, the abolition of cities, as well as outright socialism.

There are three socialist parties, each not liking the other two's brand or definition of socialism.

There's also a green party, an Alaskan independence party, an Earth federation party, a Vermont grass roots party and on and on.

Of all these 31 off-beat parties there's one party in a presidential election year. A third party, what you might call the major of all the minor parties.

And that third party which has never won can cause defeat for one of the two main contenders - the Democrat or the Republican.

And that happens when the third party man acts as a stalking horse and produces, what we call, a minority president.

Most famously Bill Clinton ran the first time against President Bush going for a second term.

Bush would have won easily but a rousing little bantam cock Texan, one Ross Perot, ran as a third party and he took just on 20 million votes away from Bush.

In the result, although 45 millions voted for Clinton, 59 millions voted against him. And, he lost the electoral vote.

Perhaps the most famous case of all was disclosed so late that very few Americans to this day know about it.

It's the year of the appalling hassle over the Florida count - the year 2000 AD - when both parties claimed they had won the electoral vote of Florida. We'll come to the electoral vote in a minute.

You recall that both parties called in a regiment of lawyers - or two regiments - and filed claims and counterclaims of fraud or failure to record votes because the voting system failed or was too difficult to handle.

Well long after the whole ruckus or rumpus was over and the Supreme Court decided to throw the Florida verdict back, as the Constitution dictates, to the Florida courts, it was disclosed that if three large Western states with small populations, and therefore small electoral votes, had given only 5% of the third party man's vote - a man named Ralph Nader - Gore would have been president without dispute.

Well back to what is normally the dramatic setting of the television networks on election night with a huge map of the United States and graphs and these winking electronic panels.

Even though the polls only close at 7pm Eastern Time the anchormen and their spies throughout the country were always ready to predict.

By spies I mean journalists, employees of the networks, who stood on the streets in every state outside the polling places and caught people on their way home or stopped them and asked them which way they'd gone.

Millions of people were quite willing to reveal their secret vote.

The results were flashed to the network headquarters, accumulated by a computer at each network, and when a positive result seemed indicated the anchorman would put an electric tick by a candidate's name and he would then proclaim "This network projects Michigan has gone for Bush". Or in the Senate race in Mississippi - "The Democrats have added another seat".

Well last Tuesday night was, for an hour or two or three, the biggest flop in the history of election coverage.

I couldn't figure out what had happened.

Promptly at 7 o'clock and then at 8 and then at 9 I switched through a dozen stations, famous for their news coverage, and either they were telling us that the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission had resigned or they were showing a love scene in which handsome and respectable lovers were kissing in the modern fashion - not kissing but competing in a tonsil-chewing contest.

At 10 o'clock suddenly everything was back to normal including the anchormen showing ticks in the margin of projected winners. Mark the word "projected".

A presidential year is most exciting because the crucial electronic panel counts the electoral votes each candidate is winning.

Now an electoral vote number if assigned to each state as an index or reflection of its population.

Thus California has 54 electoral votes, given of course to the winner of the popular vote, and the scantily populated New England state of Vermont has three electoral votes.

Well two years ago came a time, early in the evening, when two of the big networks of the big three excitedly gave Florida to Mr Gore and his electoral vote went over the required majority of 270.

Great excitement across the nation.

But more Florida votes came in and the two anchormen began to hum and haw and retract and say Florida was too close to call, then one gave it to Bush and then both retracted and as you know 36 days later, we knew.

This appalling foul-up left two networks with egg on the anchormen's faces and a very worried look on the faces of everybody else in the newsgathering business.

So all of them - the network, cable stations, press agencies - got together and financed a new improved neutral system.

It was a huge complicated computer, or rather a whole large room of computers.

It would receive an immense volume of data or data gathered from tens of thousands of exit pollsters, not employed by any network.

The details of every election would be fed into this marvellous monster.

It would wait till the winner of any contest was plainly a winner and then the magic monster would flash the same word to everybody. Fine.

By evening the whole system broke down and by 10 o'clock the networks were told, "Sorry, better go back to your own spies".

They did but it was remarkable how often the anchormen would then say "It appears that" when they were reporting a landslide.

This three-hour delay in even getting in numbers passed over as a bewilderment about what had happened nationally and why.

We went to bed, like the natives of more backward countries, to get the results in the next day's papers. In our case it was two days later.

And as for the gist of what it all means when we discovered the Republicans had a mighty victory, the big brain hasn't worked it out yet, so we had to listen to the opinions of party leaders.

The Democratic leader in the House, who is going to give up as leader, said that September 11 and fear of war with Iraq made people stay with President Bush as a sort of - er, well, er - protector.

One thing both parties agree on is that the President's five-day air trip of 10,000 miles and quick rousing little speeches in 15 states and 17 big cities might have done wonders but certainly gave a fillip to the candidates he spoke for.

So, sorry Galahad, no gist just yet.

We're forced back on the commentators and politicians' hunches, guesses and maybes, as in the olden time before the invention of the miraculous computer.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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