The startling news is now old news: Ben Nelson and Dave Heineman had won their respective races for U.S. Senate and Nebraska governor.
The question on some people's minds Wednesday was whether The Associated Press acted responsibly in calling the races with only six percent of precincts reporting at that point.
It harkened back to the controversial presidential election of 2000, when television networks prematurely called the race for President Bush even though it wasn't decided for several weeks.
What Goes Into Declaring An Early Winner
In order to examine how the decision was made, it is necessary to review the behind-the-scenes monitoring that goes into declaring a winner.The Associated Press is a member of The National Election Pool, a consortium of ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, NBC News and the AP. The group selected survey research company Edison Media Research (partnered with Mitofsky International) to conduct exit polls which project and analyze election results.
Exit polls are interviews with voters after they have cast their votes at their polling places. According to information provided by Edison/Mitofsky, an interviewer gives random voters exiting the polling place a questionnaire to complete. There are questions about demographic such as gender, age, race, and issues related to the person' s vote and questions about the person's vote choice in the different contests. Participation is voluntary and anonymous. Interviewing begins when the polls open and continues throughout the day until about an hour before they close at night.
Exit Polling Performed at 39 Nebraska Precincts
In Nebraska, the exit poll conducted for The Associated Press was performed by Edison among 1,005 voters as they left 39 randomly selected precincts around Nebraska on Tuesday. The margin of sampling error was published as "plus or minus five percentage points" for the overall sample and larger for subgroups.
The only races in Nebraska that were "exit polled" were for governor and US Senate.
So, while Republican military hero Shane Osborn was well on his way to victory over John Gathings in the state treasurer's race (Osborn had 70 percent of the vote with six percent of the precincts reporting), the AP did not declare a winner in the race in its early bulletin.
What was the advantage of calling the races so early? Staffers in the Omaha bureau of the AP did not respond to The Reader's interview requests. However, a spokesperson in the AP's New York City office said The AP will call a race if its experts and analysts are satisfied that a candidate has a significant winning margin.
In Nebraska, by declaring a winner so early in the US Senate race, national media outlets could "check off" the Cornhusker State as one whose election results were no longer hanging in the balance - an attempt to expeditiously determine which party would control Capitol Hill.
The early declaration also allowed the Omaha bureau to distribute a flurry of pre-written stories over the wire - not one of them featuring a single quote from any of the candidates. However, the stories did provide filler for newspaper's early editions.
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