Here’s a brief article I wrote for our corporate newsletter concerning our election software. It might interest computer geeks (like me).
A little more than a year after its first newscast, WFFT, Fort Wayne put together its first election coverage for the Indiana May 4th primary. We accomplished it without dedicated election software.
News Director Jim Blue constructed an Excel spreadsheet that funneled data gathered from 13 counties; totaled multi-county Congressional, State Representative, and State Senate districts; and sorted the results to place leading candidates at the top. In all, we followed 40 races on election night.
Chief Engineer Fred Brunell wrote Visual Basic code that scanned the relevant cells in the spreadsheet and directed the data for use by the Codi. We transferred the numbers from our data entry computer to the networked drive using only a flash drive.
The first results were on the air before our established competition. We maintained totals in all the races until 100 percent of the vote was in for most of our coverage area.
We felt the night demonstrated how some inventiveness and sweat can prevail over an off-the-shelf solution. And the price was right!
