While the rest of our colleagues are wrapping up their last few hours of GOTV on Election Day, grassroots solutions’ targeting guru, Andy Bechhoefer, is just getting started.  As he has in previous years, Andy spends Election Day working as part of CNN’s election decision team.  The networks all share a common exit poll these days, but they also bring in independent decision teams that analyze the polls to figure out what is going on in each race, and to advise the networks on when to call races in favor of one candidate or another. 

Around the time this post goes live, Andy will be headed into what the networks rather ominously call the Quarantine Room.  No cell phones allowed.  This room was set up so the networks could look at the polls throughout the day, without any information leaking out to the blogosphere.  In the Quarantine Room, network decision teams discuss the data as it comes in, figuring out whether the results are reliable, or, in some cases, figuring out when the polls are likely wrong. 

Once the Quarantine Room is closed at 5:00 pm, there is a mad rush to brief all the network producers on what the numbers mean and what the big stories are likely to be as Election Night unfolds.  While CNN doesn’t call any races until the polls close and they are 100% sure they are correct, by 5:00 the decision team does have an idea of what the voting results are likely to be and moves into the mode of helping CNN tell that story accurately throughout the rest of the night.

Polls start to close at 7:00 pm, and soon thereafter it gets really busy.  With more than 100 races to call, it is hard to keep track of everything at once.  This year’s big story is likely to be control of the House of Representatives.  To figure out what is going on, CNN has set up what they call a House model.  This model rates all the races before the election and then adjusts the ratings in all 435 races as the results start to come in.  The model should help CNN call control of the House and predict the number of seats each party might win, even before the West Coast polls close at 11:00 pm ET.

Look carefully when CNN cuts to commercial and you might see Andy working in the background.  He claims he has no clue when he is on camera, but you might see his superconductor brain smoking as he crunches down masses of data from the polls into broadcast-sized bits.