Election Year 2000
One of my first jobs in journalism was working as an exit poll compiler for the 2000 election.
It was a temporary gig with a now-defunct organization called the Voter News Service.
The VNS was a consortium funded by ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox and the AP.
I answered an ad in the Village Voice and went to an “interview” session in an office located in an indistinct building near Penn Station. When I got to the interview, I noticed that they had moved in to the space quickly - so quickly, in fact, that there was no nameplate on the door.
The “interview” consisted of me giving my drivers license, my social security, filling out a W-4 and answering a few perfunctory questions (Are you a student? What was your last job?) to guarantee I wasn’t a raving lunatic.
With that, I had a job working as a poll compiler. It was my duty to man the phones election night and to work at a computer terminal.
Exit poll reporters at precincts around the country would call in results to us. I would enter them into a computer, maybe make 30 seconds of small talk and take the next call.
When we were being prepped for work, we were told that we would be working out of yet another rented office space.
It was in the World Trade Center, on a floor in the thirties. Less than a year after I took this one-night job, the WTC would cease to exist.
At our orientation, we were all asked if we understood everything and were okay with it. “It” being the fact that we were expected to work a 12+ hour shift from noon to well past midnight.
Being 19 years old and trying to crack a lame joke, I said I’d be okay with it as long as I knew where the coffeemaker was. I was told there wasn’t a coffeemaker. However, the woman who told me that looked disappointed about it too… Caffeine unites people.
On Election Day, I handled the phones. The precincts that called in to my station were predominantly from Missouri, Delaware, the New England states and Wyoming.
I marveled at the election in Missouri - where a politician named John Ashcroft was being trounced in the Senate race by a recently deceased politician named Mel Carnahan. That’s right… Ashcroft was losing to a dead man.
Ultimately, I worked the phones at the WTC from noon until 1:30 in the morning. We did not have access to radio, television or the internet. I didn’t encounter anyone there who snuck a radio in…
But the exit polls I was handling consistently reported Gore as the winner. I left, tired and with red eyes from the computer screen, at 1:30 in the morning thinking Gore had won the election.
I came home to my shared studio apartment (college poverty, yo!) to find out about the whole 2000 election debacle and that George W. Bush was the presumed winner. I was stunned and had trouble jibing it with what I had been hearing all day, working the exit polls firsthand.
Three years later, the VNS was disbanded in part for its inept handling of the 2000 election.
All I know is that I left the VNS offices craving coffee and thinking Al Gore would be the 43rd President of the United States.
