Election Week Activities

Hello everyone,

The newspaper-based learning activities for election week (below) will be posted on the Newspapers in Education website on Monday (www.statesman.com/NIE)

Thank you and have a great weekend.

Debra Joiner

Recording election history, piece by piece, day by day

Newspapers, a famous editor once said, are the first rough draft of history.
What he meant was that every day’s newspapers report the latest history of the nation, its states and its communities.

Then, as new events take place, the next day’s newspapers update history with the latest information, making it clearer and more complete.

A presidential election puts a spotlight on this special role for newspapers, especially a fiercely fought election such as the one this year.

Newspapers, and TV news, have spent months informing the public about what the candidates were saying, and how voters were responding.

They have attempted to gauge the nation’s mood week by week through elaborate opinion polls that sometimes showed conflicting results.

And this week, they are working around the clock to make sense of what has happened in the election, sort out its meaning and inform readers of what it will mean for the future.

Key issues to be examined include the effectiveness of the Electoral College system (and whether it should be changed), the role of legal challenges and lawsuits in counting votes, and how any leader can unite a nation that has been deeply divided between parties and beliefs.

The importance of these issues reminds everyone why the nation’s founders valued a free press so much they guaranteed it in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Map the results

The key to winning the presidency is winning enough states to get the 270 electoral votes needed for victory in the Electoral College. This college is not an education institution. It is a group of leaders from each state who vote to determine the outcome of the election, based on each state’s results.
The Electoral College was created by the leaders who drew up the U.S. Constitution. When voters go to the polls in a presidential election, they’re actually voting for a slate of electors. The party with the most votes in a state gets to elect its electors. It’s a winner-take-all system in most states, which makes it possible for a candidate to win the popular vote nationally but lose the election by losing the Electoral College vote.

Each state has a number of electors equal to the number of U.S. Senators and Representatives it has in Congress.
After the nation votes on Election Day this week, use the newspaper and online resources to review where each candidate got his electoral votes.
In what states did Democrat Barack Obama do best? In what states did Republican John McCain do best?

Finding information

Information about election results comes in many forms in a newspaper. To explore this, break into teams and search the newspaper for election news in the following forms: a news story; a chart or graph; a photograph; a table of statistics or data; a map; an editorial cartoon. For each example you find, write a complete sentence describing what is good or helpful about getting information in that form.

Activities

1. Even with 24-hour news on cable TV and the Internet, newspapers and their Web sites remain the most complete, easy-to-use, written account of the elections and results. Starting with Wednesday’s paper, follow the coverage of election results and issues through the week. For each day, write out the top news in the presidential election, a statewide or district election and a local election. Compare findings as a class and discuss.

2. In this year’s presidential race, opinion polls got a lot of attention from newspapers and TV news. Use the newspaper or Internet to find the results of the last opinion polls before Election Day. How accurate were the polls? Why do you think that was the case?

3. Election results can help you learn some important things about numbers that appear in a series. MEAN is the average of all numbers in a series, MODE is the number that appears most often in a series and MEDIAN is the number that appears in the middle in a series. With the newspaper and other resources, study the state-by-state election results. What was the mean percentage achieved by Barack Obama in states he won? What was the mean percentage achieved by John McCain in states he won? What was the mode for each candidate?

4. When there are big stories like a presidential election, newspaper reporters interview local leaders to get their views. Search the coverage in today’s newspaper to find comments by local leaders on the election. Write a summary of the points made by three local leaders.


Debra Waugh Joiner
Newspapers in Education Manager
Austin American-Statesman
(512) 445-3590
dwaugh@statesman.com
www.statesman.com/NIE