Election Night Odds and Ends

"Voting is so easy, so not physically demanding, so easy to dramatize. It's

so disappointing that people don't care to vote," says Emily Carmichael, a first-year, minutes before she leaves for the airport.

Carmichael lives in New York, and neglected to request an absentee ballot. But bar a catastrophe, she'll add her vote to Ralph Nader's presidential tally. Carmichael, who is also a Crimson cartoonist, planned to scurry to Logan, hop on a Delta Shuttle and vote with her mother in their Upper West Side precinct.

Though she readily admits she doesn't know much about politics, Carmichael says she became committed to voting because of her first voting experience, when, in 1996 she went to the polls and voted with her mother.

"What we did was, we voted for Bill Clinton, we voted for all the women candidates, for the people who had Spanish-sounding names," she said.

(This year, the Democrat says she'll cast a vote for Rick Lazio because "his name sounds Italian.")

This semester, she's taking a government class, and wrote a paper on voter turnout. There is no escaping politics at Harvard.

"The atmosphere of vital, interested discourse that is all around me is staggering," she says.

Despite her political interests, she won't concentrate in Social Studies. "Probably VES," she says.

--Marc J. Ambinder

***

It happens every year. A major wire service falsely calls a race, or calls a race before it has finished. With hundreds of reporters, dozens of technicians and scores of editors, mistakes happen.

Here's the one we found:

11-07-00 13:55,

By The Associated Press

Here are the latest nationwide election returns in the race for

president with 0 percent of the nation's precincts reporting. The

winner is marked with an 'x'.

Gore 0 - 0 percent

Has won 1 state with 9 ev.

Leads in 0 state with 0 ev.

The one state: Alabama, which, unless every demographer, political scientist and pollster in the country is wrong, is incredibly conservative.

The A.P., by the way, corrected itself an hour later.

****

HOW EXIT POLLS ARE CONDUCTED

Voter News Service, a cooperative service of The Associated Press, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox and NBC, conducted its exit poll in the New Hampshire general election by interviewing 1,195 voters as they left polling places in 30 precincts statewide Tuesday.

Each poll precinct was picked randomly in a process that was organized to reflect state geography and past vote by party.

As people left voting booths, interviewers for the service asked them to fill out a confidential questionnaire. Voters were chosen at a set interval--such as every fifth person--so that each voter had an equal chance of being picked.

The results were adjusted to reflect the demographic characteristics of the precincts selected, as well as the observed sex, race and estimated age of voters who refused to participate.

As with any poll, the results could vary because of chance variations in the sample. For this poll, there was one chance in 20 that sampling error would cause the results to vary by more than

3.5 percentage points either way from the opinions of all voters who participated in the state's election. The error margin was higher for subgroups in the sample.

Polls are subject to other sources of error, such as from question wording or order.

-The Associated Press

****

OUCH - Martin Travis, challenger to Rep. Barney Frank, claimed he was more qualified because he has worked in the private sector, owns a home and is raising a family--unlike Frank, who is openly gay. Travis lost by a large margin in Frank's solidly Democratic district.

QUOTABLE - He sent "these young Democratic workers out door-to-door, knocking on the door--boom, boom, boom!--like jackbooted Hitler Youth." - Republican candidate for Senate Jack E. Robinson criticizing Kennedy and

Democrats for challenging his nominating signatures.

--The Associated Press

****

GET OUT THE VOTE

Massachusetts statewide turnout was 39.9 percent in this election.