Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

And this day, friends, is our last Sunday show before the election.

We started doing these Sunday shows to kind of give ourselves a chance on the weekend to stretch

out a bit and take on a broader range of topics, especially as related to the election.

The election of course is this coming Tuesday.

So for today's episode, we thought that instead of focusing in on one particular election

moment, we'd run through a number of them all along this

theme, how we communicate election results. I don't want to get two tree falling in the

woods on everyone but an election doesn't really exist until the votes are counted and the results are communicated and throughout the years that thing the communicating of the results has been a particularly tricky thing, especially on election night itself, especially through the media.

And I'm not telling you anything new that this will continue to be an issue this year with all sorts of murkiness about when exactly the election

will be quote unquote over how contested it may be and how the press will absolutely be a part of all of that.

So maybe history can give us some lessons or at least a little bit of

stuff to mull as we await results and partial results and confusing results and

spin and bad faith and how excited are we for election night this year? With us to have this conversation as always is Nicole Hemmer of Columbia.

Hello, Nicki.

Hello, I'm in this like space of trauma now as we're talking about election nights and waiting for results.

And our guest here who are bringing into our space of trauma is Jad Abumrod, host of Radio

Lab who will be doing this with us today.

Jad, thank you for coming on.

And I'm happy to join you in your space of trauma,

pre-trauma, we're like pre-game trauma.

...