After two humiliating technology failures, six major news services are disbanding VNS, a consortium formed to count votes and conduct Election Day surveys. How could the system have been overhauled before disaster struck twice?

Voter News Service: What Went Wrong?
In November 2000, a "perfect storm" of vote-counting miscues and polling problems led the major TV networks repeatedly to change their minds as to whether Al Gore or George Bush was the next president. In November 2002, a second storm whipped through the networks' election broadcasts.

Unfinished and mismanaged efforts to update the computer systems used by Voter News Service forced executives at the consortium's owners—ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, NBC and the Associated Press—to abandon the use of exit polling data before it even got all collected. Indeed, by mid-January the failures led to the disbanding of VNS itself. On Jan. 13, the six organizations said only that they were "collectively reviewing a number of strong options'' to avoid another fiasco in the future.
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