| If you watched the 2002 election results on WFOR CBS 4, you were watching the work of a host of Gold Coast Mac members who volunteered to help return the raw returns into television ready numbers which showed who was winning, and who was losing.
The biggest winner was CBS 4, which in part because of the expertise of the Gold Coast Mac volunteers, consistently reported results more quickly and other South Florida news outlets.
Gold Coast Mac assistance was enlisted by GCMac President Dave Game, who was in charge of the CBS 4 election coverage. It was one of Game’s responsibilities to make sure elections results from Miami-Dade, Broward, Monroe, and Palm Beach counties were reported quickly and accurately, alongside the numbers from across the state. In addition to CBS 4, game was also responsible for getting election results on UPN 33 and West Palm Beach station WTXV, both of which, like WFOR, and owned by Viacom. Because of the size of the ballot and the huge geographic area covered, this meant tabulating and displaying results from over 300 races and questions on three TV stations.
While the statewide numbers were gathered from the Associated Press wire and automatically processed by CBS 4’s computerized display system, local races all had to be gathered and updated by hand, a process made difficult by the size of the ballot.
In an effort to shorten the time between updates, Game needed to add more tabulation teams to translate the results from supervisors of elections websites into channel 4’s election computer system, which would display them on the air.
The problem was finding ten people who were willing to read out numbers from websites, for hours, or type those numbers into a computer, with repeated updates. Not only did they have to be willing, but they needed to be computer savvy, and be concerned about accuracy. Game needed ten people, five teams of two. And they could not be from his news staff; as those people already had other election night assignments.
Game turned to the most computer-literate people they knew, and the members of Gold Coast Mac responded in force. Board members Andre Perwin, Jim Bolinger, Esver Camacho, and Sandy Medina were joined by Sandy’s husband Gus, and member Richard Lynn, to form three of the five teams. They were joined by publicist Teri Lynn, a longtime friend of Game, and by three staff members from other parts of CBS 4.
All of the local results seen by WTVX in West Palm Beach were due to the efforts of Richard Lynn and his CBS 4 staffer partner; every single local result for Miami-Dade county was input by Gold Coast Mac volunteers, and half the numbers for Broward local races were the result of GCMac efforts.It took six hours to input all the numbers for two newscasts and dozens for updates on three stations, but the GCMac team did a great job, impressing CBS 4 news managers.
“They couldn’t believe how fast and thorough the volunteers were,” Game said, “and they were amazed a computer user group would care enough to give their time to help make our election coverage outstanding.”
CBS 4 provided dinner and snacks for the volunteers, and Esver Camacho brought Cuban pastries from his El Brazo Fuerte bakery. After the results were in, Game took the volunteers on a tour of the television station, and gave them a chance to see the world from a news anchor’s perspective.
“They were great,” Game said. “Everyone, from voters to election officials, was concerned out this election, and everyone was scrutinizing everything. We literally could not have done this without Gold Coast Mac.”
November 2002
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