DocZ's Blog

The furor of outrage against Lake County, Indiana, for turning in its election results slowly is another example of the misplaced priorities that so pervade our political and journalistic scenes. The mania for early returns puts undue pressure on local election boards. We have become a society that is incapable of delayed gratification, even where that is appropriate and desirable.

Television networks so greedy for a “scoop”—in an electronic age in which the very notion of “scoop” is anachronistic and atavistic—still rush to predict winners even if their doing so could skew results in places whose polls are still open when the predictions are made.

It is past time for us to eschew this kind of insidious narcissistic self-aggrandizement at the cost of reasoned political discourse.

If I had my way—I will worry, or let the Supreme Court worry, about the legality later—I would enact legislation prohibiting any state or television network from releasing any results or predictions on a given election day until the last precinct of the last state to vote on that day is closed.