Senator considers resurrecting legislation to regulate election reporting
By The Associated Press
11.27.00
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| Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, right, watches TV election
returns on Nov. 7 in Anchorage. |
WASHINGTON — Sen. Ted Stevens is considering resurrecting a
couple of election ideas after reviewing the Nov. 7 election.
Stevens, R-Alaska, says he believes televised election reports from
the East Coast affected voting in Western states. He says he would like to see
uniform polling place hours nationwide and that he wants television stations
prohibited from broadcasting information about exit polls.
Stevens said he came up with a similar proposal that passed in the
Senate in the 1970s but died in the House.
Stevens says he understands that limiting the media could raise
difficult free-speech issues.
"It's a very touchy thing," he said.
The senator said the Federal Communications Commission could ban exit
poll reporting as a condition of obtaining a federal license to broadcast
television signals on a particular frequency.
"It's not regulating them, it's conditioning them," Stevens said.
Both Stevens and Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, said the exit poll
reports were discussed at a Republican strategy meeting in Florida last
weekend.
Stevens also said the Internet, which didn't exist when he made his
last proposal, would be harder to control because the FCC has no control over
who uses it. "I do not think we could condition the Internet releases," he
said.
Stevens says something needs to be done about televised exit poll
projections, which he says "influence elections." He cites the broadcast
networks bungling of their calls of the presidential race in Florida, where
both George W. Bush and Al Gore were declared the winner at various times on
election night.
He believes that some Republicans, hearing the networks' incorrect
projections that Bush had lost Florida, may have decided not to vote because
they thought Gore's election was a foregone conclusion.
"Our people just didn't go to vote," Stevens said. "In California,
some of the people who were calling to get out the vote just went home."
Meanwhile, Walter Cronkite has a suggestion for news organizations
trying to call election night winners: Slow down.
"I don't understand the need for this speed, although I was certainly
one of the progenitors of the whole idea of the exit polling," Cronkite said in
an interview in yesterday's Charleston, W.Va., Gazette-Mail.
"Nowadays, with the exit polling, we're calling these states so early
that there are really some three hours left of voting time out on the West
Coast, and it seems to me that very probably it could work just as well to
withhold returns until all the states have voted," the retired CBS anchorman
said.
The electoral mayhem in Florida "kind of casts all of our thinking a
little differently than it had been up to this election," he added.
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