Button, Button, Who's Got the Winner?

Back in the '20s and '30s, radio made election nights social occasions. Armed with pencils and ruled-off pads, the group around the set had plenty of time for argument and suspense, listening to the votes pile up. Television took the pencil-and-paper fun out of things by substituting the tote board, accompanied by the Friendly Pundit to explain what the flicking numbers seemed to mean. Now the computer is in danger of spoiling the party altogether by announcing the winners before anyone has time to open a can of beer.

Today the trick is to be first with an authoritative prediction of the result. CBS was first by 37 minutes in announcing Henry Cabot Lodge's New Hampshire victory at 7:18 p.m., only 18 minutes after the polls closed. NBC came back strong, was first in Illinois by 55 minutes and Oregon by 22 minutes, only to lose out again, by four minutes, to CBS in Maryland. To cover California's primary, NBC has signed up 34,000 people to gather fast returns at the precinct level, mostly members of the Mormon Relief Society, which supplied volunteers in exchange for NBC's $10,000 donation. ABC has mustered 32,000, mostly members of the California Teachers Association. CBS loftily professed to be above the numbers game; Said a spokesman: "We think it is better to have one good, trained division in the field than a million untrained troops."

Before this year's presidential campaign is over, NBC, CBS and ABC will have spent $25 million on news coverage--triple their 1960 expenditure. Justification is the cash value of prestige. "It's an intangible," says NBC Executive Vice President William McAndrew, "but sales people say that our news image definitely makes sales for the whole network schedule."

But about two-thirds of the cost will be recovered by advertising income. Secondary fees will also be coming in from selling computer services: NBC has the Associated Press and the New York Herald Tribune as customers for its Electronic Vote Analysis, and CBS has signed up the New York Times and the Washington Post for its Vote Profile Analysis. CBS has trucked its computers on from Oregon to California and hopes to have the main answer (Rockefeller or Goldwater?) 18 minutes after the polls close. NBC will shoot its data to computers in New Jersey and hopes to have an analysis back on the rebound within just 30 seconds.

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