The breakout star of the 2014 primaries is not a candidate

The Decision Desk, run by blogger Brandon Finnigan as an extension of the conservative Ace of Spades blog, began as an idea a decade ago. In 2004, Finnigan was attending college and watching the election night results between President George W. Bush and then-Sen. John Kerry.

“I was watching the returns come in and I had noticed that there were a few counties at the time … that actually did post the results online. … And the AP [returns] and the numbers that the media market had weren’t up — they weren’t included in the totals.”

Finnigan said it was “confusing” and “frustrating” that the numbers were coming in so slowly.

“Maybe they just have a method that they’ve used for so long that no one’s considered that there might be another way to get these numbers faster,” Finnigan said. “And since no one’s ever challenged them, it just keeps being the same thing.”

It would be seven years before Finnigan would revisit the idea. In 2011, he and the rest of the Ace of Spades crew watched the returns come in for a critical Wisconsin Supreme Court election. A Waukesha County clerk’s error initially gave the impression that then-Assistant Attorney General Joanne Kloppenburg had defeated incumbent David Prosser. The future of Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s union reforms hung in the balance.

“Someone that night noticed something odd, which was when the AP totals came in for Waukesha, there was a supposed jump in precincts counted … but there was no jump in votes,” Finnigan said.

The AP didn’t notice the anomaly, but the AOS crew did. “That got me thinking, would there be a way for us to tabulate these totals in real time? And could we do it faster than the AP?’”

Finnegan said that during the May 2012 Democratic primary in Walker’s recall election, he and fellow Ace of Spades bloggers watched three large counties — Milwaukee, Dane and Waukesha. The bloggers managed to tabulate the numbers for those three counties about an hour before the AP announced its totals, according to Finnigan. For the general recall election in June, Finnigan said he and the AOS crew had “precincts counted and votes tabulated about 20 minutes before anything showed up from the AP.”

Flash forward to the 2014 primaries, when the crew expanded their experiment. The job has gotten easier since the 2012 Walker recall, when Finnigan had only a dozen volunteers gathering vote totals, one precinct at a time. That number has grown to 135. That’s because the site’s successes have served as a magnet for other election junkies. What’s more, there are no technical requirements for volunteers. “If you can turn on a computer or answer a cell phone, you’re hired, basically,” he said.

“The goal for us has been to get the results out, get the results in — like actually be able to compare them, look at them compare them to historical results — and then make the call before everyone else can,” Finnigan said.

And they have been fast. Finnigan claims they have beaten AP with the call in every race this year. In some of them, the AP didn’t make a call on election night, making it easy for Finnigan’s team to chime in first. In other races, like Florida’s special House election between Republican David Jolly and Democrat Alex Sink, the AOS crew called the race on Twitter 17 minutes before the AP.

During Virginia’s June 10 primary, in which longshot Republican candidate Dave Brat made history by defeating House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., Finnigan and his volunteers called the race at 7:31 p.m. Eastern Time — roughly a half hour before the AP.

Finnigan claims the Ace of Spades team has gotten only one race wrong this year, on the first ballot between incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., and Tea Party challenger Chris McDaniel. As the results came in, Finnigan declared the race would result in a runoff between the two candidates, with Cochran taking a higher percentage of the first-round vote. He was right about the runoff, but wrong about Cochran, who finished half a percentage point behind. In the runoff election, however, the AOS crew correctly called the race for Cochran — one hour and 18 minutes before the AP.

Finnigan speculated that the AP hasn’t taken advantage of improvements to technology, and that maybe they were also being extra conservative to avoid erroneous calls. But the AOS team hasn’t done poorly. He says their calls have been correct in 47 out of 48 races they have worked so far (all but the Cochran/McDaniel primary).

And the AP is facing more competition, as AOS is not alone in the world of organic efforts at improving election coverage. Finnigan said he is especially fond of the work of one ideological adversary, David Nir of Daily Kos Elections.

Finnigan said that if there’s any interest, he would eventually consider hiring out his system and services to news organizations. But for now, he just wants to build the AOS Decision Desk into something more comprehensive. He envisions a site with polling, in-house commentaries on races, historical data, and summaries that include demographic breakdowns and campaign narratives.

He declined to give too many details about the process he and his volunteers use to gather returns, but he said it has involved crafting relationships with county clerks to get the numbers as soon as possible. “If we focus on it, we study up on a race; we realized that with our volunteers and our system we can effectively beat the dinosaur media at their own game,” he said.

Finnigan and his band of amateurs have proven there’s nothing magical about professional news organizations’ footwork on election night. “With enough time and dedication and study, anyone can do this,” he said.

“Every single website has somebody who talks about the elections or writes pieces about polls,” Finnigan said. “Anyone who can get basic training in journalism can write about an election. It’s not that hard.”