Margaret Hoover

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PBS has fresh surge of election specials

As the political conventions ended, networks retreated to their previous lives.
They have new game shows and old cop shows. The election is confined to their newscasts and occasional debates.
With one exception. PBS was the only broadcast network to give all of prime time to the conventions; now it has more coverage. In addition to “PBS News Hour” (7-8 p.m. weekdays on most stations) and any debates, that includes:
— “Counting the Votes” (shown here), 9:30 p.m. Tuesday (Aug. 27). Margaret Hoover starts with Jeb Bush and the bipartisan reforms that followed the 2000 election chaos in Florida. She goes on to tour other states and finds, among other things, that virtually every presidential vote is now on paper. (I posted a story on this previously, but I’ll include it at the end of this list.) Read more…

By Mike Hughes / August 23, 2024
Stories

Counting the votes? Here (really) is bipartisan consensus

As the election nears, we can fret about all the ways that vote-counts can go wrong. Or we can marvel that they rarely do.
“Think about what a miracle an election is,” said David Becker, head of the non-partisan Center for Election Innovation and Research. “We count 160 million pieces of paper” and do it “exceptionally fast.”
And it’s done in a wildly decentralized way. “We practice a fierce federalism,” said Ralph Ginsberg, a Republican election lawyer for 40 years.
Each state sets its own rules, often leaving room for local variations. The result, Becker said, is “a system of 10,000 different jurisdictions and hundreds of thousands of volunteers.”
They were talking to the Television Critics Association about “Counting the Vote,” a Margaret Hoover (shown here) film that airs Aug. 27 on PBS. And this was a truly bi-partisan collection. Read more…

By Mike Hughes / August 6, 2024