US Election Day Coverage of Voting Processes

Voting in the U.S. is a costly activity, so the public looks to the news media for information. And yet, we know little about news coverage of voting. We first defined voting process coverage (VPC) and developed a manually validated organic dictionary to identify VPC. We then conducted automated content analyses on a national television Election Day news corpus featuring three elections, and used a unique dataset of local television news from 11 states and DC as a robustness check. Finally, we deployed a second manually validated organic dictionary to analyze and compare the same corpus to a better-known type of coverage: the game frame. We found that VPC far surpasses game frame coverage on Election Day and the day prior. Our results suggest the need for more scholarly attention on Election Day television news coverage, particularly given the potential civic function of such coverage.