FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Error During Election Broadcast Leading to Incorrect Data Being Displayed on Screen
Nov. 11, 2022
AUBURN, Ala. — During election night on Nov. 8, 2022, our third-party service provider, which was feeding our system with election data, had an issue with their servers. As a result, this caused us to need to manually input election numbers for the first five hours of our broadcast.
Due to this issue with our provider and the manual input required, we incorrectly reported numbers in our broadcast. The issue included incorrect vote counts and incorrect percentages, which were displayed on screen for just over a minute starting at 10:04 p.m. ET and ending at 10:05 p.m. ET.
Our talented anchors caught the error and corrected it on-air, informing everyone the graphic was incorrect and the numbers did not add up. We immediately took it off the air when it was brought to our attention. The numbers were incorrect compared to the actual numbers tabulated by the secretary of state of Pennsylvania.
Humans are fallible; this was an example of a human error, not an intentional public misleading. We do apologize for any confusion this brought about. Moving forward, we have implemented new measures to verify numbers before they are aired and ensure we receive correct and up-to-date information from our third-party provider.