I caught that horrible cold that is going around and lost a couple of days of work this week, so I am going to do two things at once: Write this column and make our election night coverage plan.
I just printed the sample ballot, and the first thing I need to do is mark it up to give to our A1 page designer, Romana Wood, so that she can create the election results rail that lists all of the races and the voter turnout. Back in the old days when I was a reporter, there used to be multiple voter counts issued on election night, so keeping the rail up to date took a full-time person. Now there is only one count issued, so it’s a matter of setting up the boxes in advance and then filling in the numbers.
Since the ballot is eight pages long, I’m going to need to do some abbreviating. Rather than list almost 40 candidates in the Senate race, let’s just list the presumptive major party front-runners, Maria Cantwell and Susan Hutchison, and the Clark County candidates: Joey Gibson, Brad Chase and RC Smith. Likewise, we can leave out the races where all candidates will advance to the general election, and the 56 precinct committee races.
Now that’s done, it’s time to turn to what will happen on election night. The first thing to do is ask for a late deadline. We release the last page from the newsroom around 11 p.m. so that the press can start at 11:30 p.m. An extra half hour will help the reporters make one more phone call and allow the editors to give the stories one more look. But going late can cause stress for our production and circulation departments. Luckily their directors, Cris Matta and Ben Campbell, understand the need and OK’d the plan.
