Should we have faith in our elections?
NBC News and MSNBC national political correspondent Steve Kornacki — the man in the khakis who stands in front of the big map and breaks down the results on Election Day — says yes.
America doesn’t have one nationally administered election, but instead a series of state-administered elections. Even within the states, county boards of elections take over major aspects of the process.
“What it ends up creating is this vastly decentralized system,” Kornacki said in the latest episode of “The Poynter Report Podcast.” “There could be all sorts of inefficiencies in that if you get particularly slow counties in terms of reporting in their votes, that sort of thing. There can be frustrations to that.
“But what I think it does is — when you start talking about, ‘Was the election fixed in some way or something?’ — it’s not like there’s one central nerve that you can kind of disrupt that’ll change the election result all across the country. You would really have to do something — if you’re up to something, up to some sort of malfeasance — you’d have to do it in precincts, thousands of precincts all over the country. So that decentralization, I think, is actually a pretty good fail-safe when it comes to election security.”
In the new episode, Kornacki and Poynter senior media writer Tom Jones, the host of the podcast, break down how the average person should look at polls, the surprising part of the country that Kornacki looks at as a bellwether on election night and whether he prefers covering elections or the Kentucky Derby.
Background reading:
- Behind the scenes with MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki, who’s helping save democracy with that big map (Tom Jones, Poynter)
- Khakis, the big map and one of the sexiest men alive — NBC News’ Steve Kornacki gets ready for his big night (Tom Jones, Poynter)
- What do horse race journalists think of ‘horse race journalism’? (Annie Aguiar, Poynter)
- The Kornacki Paradox: On election nights, we turn to MSNBC’s data maven for clarity. Actually, he’s full of doubt. (Anna Peele, The Washington Post)
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Credits:
The Poynter Report Podcast is produced by the Department of Journalism and Digital Communication at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg
- Host: Tom Jones
- Executive Producers: Elliott Wiser and Ren LaForme
- Producers: Madilyn Siner, Noah Chase and Tom Jones
- Director: Christopher Campbell
- Special thank you: Neil Brown and Dr. Mark Walters
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