The tyranny of the voting needle

The New York Times pokes the readers’ eyes again with his needle. A small digital gauge, like the one that might indicate your boiler or nuclear power plant is about to explode, “estimates the outcome of the race in real time based on polling data,” which Times puts it. As we write this, the needle pierces the red “Likely” side of the meter, indicating that the decision is “Likely Trump.” To validate this qualitative assessment, the needle also specifies, again as we write this, that Donald Trump has an 88 percent chance of victory. That’s good to know, or bad, depending on your preferences.

The Times is not alone in offering minute-by-minute ratings, of course. On television, news anchors talk endlessly about anything or nothing reporting live from Nevada or North Carolina. On CNN.com, the network’s familiar election map also offers live results, in an interface now so confusing that one of us couldn’t figure out how to back out of the Georgia results after zooming in. The whole affair is intended to provide updates on an outcome completely beyond our control. At some point, probably not tonight and maybe not tomorrow, we will know who won the presidential election—and also all the other federal and state contests and ballot initiatives and the like.

There is no good way to consume election night information anymore, if there ever was. Cable news is the loud, exhausting, touchscreen-assisted option for those looking for the dopamine of a harmless Key-Race Alert. Social media is the best option if you want all that, but is updated every second with comments from Nazis and people who have placed big crypto bets on the outcome. It is a magnificent achievement to wrangle data coming out of more than 100,000 precincts in a country spanning six time zones and upwards of 161 million registered voters. However, the process is not conducive to the human need to actually know things. In a way, the needle is the ChatGPT aggregation of the output of toxic sludge and useful information that comes out of it all. It is the supposed signal in the noise. But that might just be noise itself…until it isn’t.

For some time now, we’ve been laughing at an ongoing joke at X about “building dashboards to give executives deeper insight into critical business functions.” (In any case, we think these are jokes.) What would you do if a giant kaiju attacked the city? Ensure dashboards provide actionable insight into critical business functions. What are you doing in your 30s? Get married, start businesses, or … build dashboards to provide actionable insights. You get the picture.

The jokes are funny because they implicate a horrible everyday business thing called “business-intelligence-dashboards.” Big data, data science, data-driven decision making and a host of related biz buzz suggest that you, me, him, them, all should collect as much data as possible about anything, and then use that data to make decisions. But it is difficult, so it must be made easy. Thus dashboards. Like a car’s speedometer, but scaled up to any level of complexity, a dashboard provides easy, quick “insight” into the endless silos of data, making it “actionable”. This is a contradiction – hence the jokes.

That’s how it is with Times forecast needle (and the CNN map and everything else). Elections are increasingly uncertain because they are always so close; because the ballot is filled or destroyed; because disinformation, confusion, suppression, or God knows what else has made it impossible to have any sense of how these contests might play out in advance. The promise of synthesizing all that uncertainty moments after a state’s polls close and turning it into knowledge is too tempting to ignore. So you tune in to the news. You refresh the needle.

But what you learn is nothing but how you feel good or bad at the moment. That the needle has clearly caused many extremely online coastal elites to have some mild form of PTSD is clearly a feature, not a bug. It’s a reminder of the power of the needle, or perhaps more accurately, its ability to move in such a way that it seems to initiate its own reality (when in fact it’s just reflecting changes in a spreadsheet of information). The needle is manipulative.

Worst of all, nothing about it is “actionable,” as the business-insights-dashboard fanatics would say. Dashboards promise a modicum of control. But what are you going to do now that the polls are closed and you’re in your pyjamas? Cheer, or bite your nails, or try to coax your spouse away from the television or the needle, or eat cake or drink liquor or stare into space or high-five your buds or clean up after you have a tantrum. There is nothing you can do. It’s out of your hands and no amount of data, polling, boss analysis or anything else can change that. You know, and yet you still stare.