Forever wrong
A taut election, a fraught vote count, a blown result call.
It’s all so very now. But it also happened back in 1960 when the principals were John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, and the prognosticator was a computer called Univac.
Newsday’s editorial board addressed the situation in the presidential election in a Nov. 10, 1960, editorial called “For All the People.”
“When we wrote yesterday’s editorial about the election of John F. Kennedy as President, it was about 3 in the morning, and it still seemed he might win big,” the board wrote. “Univac said so; the trend appeared to be in that direction; he appeared to have a clear-cut mandate from the voters.”
Kennedy ended up winning the popular vote by 0.17% — or, as the board put it, “a margin of only two votes per each precinct.”
But the board’s pique was stirred by Univac, one of the world’s first commercial computers which was being used to predict the winner based on early returns. And when Kennedy opened a big early lead based on voting in large Northeastern and Midwestern cities, Univac went along with what looked like a trend and predicted a Kennedy rout.
But Nixon began closing that gap as returns were reported from the rural and suburban Midwest, the Rocky Mountain states, and the West Coast. Kennedy’s victory wasn’t certain until later on Wednesday. “The one lesson this election has taught us all is that when voting is close, machines are just as fallible as man,” the board wrote of the 1960 race. “Univac and its counterparts on the TV networks made a miserable botch of forecasting the eventual result.”
But there is more to this story. That beleaguered Univac computer had made its debut in the 1952 election between Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower and Democrat Adlai Stevenson, the first nationwide TV broadcast of a presidential election and the first election night broadcast for Walter Cronkite.
CBS reporter Charles Collingwood was assigned to Univac, and explained to viewers how the “fabulous electronic machine” would be used. But the first few times Cronkite turned to Collingwood for a prediction from Univac, the machine did not respond — no doubt leaving viewers unimpressed.
As it turned out, though, Univac had responded — with a prediction so preposterous that someone held it back. The race between Eisenhower and Stevenson had seemed close during the campaign, but around 8:30 p.m. with only 3.4 million votes counted, Univac had predicted a big Eisenhower win and said the odds were 100 to 1 for a victory by the World War II hero.
When its computer printout was revealed hours later, it read, “It’s awfully early, but I’ll go out on a limb,” and predicted a 438-93 Electoral College win for Ike. The final tally: 442-89.
After midnight, a representative of Remington Rand, Univac’s maker, appeared on the CBS broadcast.
“As more votes came in, the odds came back and it was obviously evident that we should have had the nerve enough to believe the machine in the first place,” he said. “It was right. We were wrong. Next year we’ll believe it.”
— Michael Dobie @mwdobie and Amanda Fiscina-Wells @adfiscina
