While some students were tallying votes in Columbus, others were voting in Findlay. Above, a group of students rides in a UF shuttle to their designated location. Photo by M. Marrash

A small contingency from UF had a hand in behind-the-scenes news coverage in Columbus during the historic presidential election on Nov. 4.

Communication professor Diana Montague, 2008 UF grad Candace Haskell, and UF students Christine Lastoskie, Skylar Mettert, Derek Moyer and Abby Wilson traveled to the offices of Ohio News Now (ONN) and WBNS-TV10 on election night to help collect and record election returns for the evening’s live news coverage. The six from Findlay joined about 15 other volunteers who collected local results from all 88 counties in Ohio by repeatedly calling Boards of Election and monitoring each county’s posted returns on the Internet.

Amy Rogan (UF ’94), the executive producer at ONN, gave the Findlay group a special tour of the television stations, which had extra monitors and special staging for election night coverage.

For sophomore journalism major Abby Wilson, the tour of the two television stations that share one building was an important part of her experience, as she’s very interested in a broadcast journalism career. “I went (to ONN) because I thought it would be great experience for my major and I thought it would be fun to take a small part of the historic election,” said Wilson.

All of the students were surprised at how much manual labor goes into compiling the myriad election results. The detail work of gathering election results and updating the numbers in ONN’s computer system got to be exhausting by the end of the night, but the UF group was delighted to have had a hand in the process.

“It was interesting to learn how the data is put on the air,” said Derek Moyer, a senior history and political science major. “Seeing our data that we collected scrolling across the ONN news coverage made it feel as if what I was doing was actually vitally important to the operations.”

The night culminated in staff and volunteers gathering around multiple television monitors in the newsrooms to listen to Sen. John McCain’s concession speech and President-Elect Barack Obama’s victory speech.  

According to junior political science major Christine Lastoskie, “Being able to have the election results quickly and watching the news channels announcing the winners and the different ways in which they did so was exciting. Of course, I was excited that Obama won as well.”

By Diana Montague, Ph.D.