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Tom Ross

Tom Ross' column appears Tuesdays and Sundays in Steamboat Today. Contact him at 970-871-4205 or tross@SteamboatToday.com.

Steamboat Springs — High-tech voting machines are taking all the adventure out of election night.

The possibility that the Pilot & Today staff will pull an all-nighter this evening is remote. But there was a day when young reporters hadn't earned their stripes until they'd seen the sun rise on the Wednesday morning after election night.

I'm talking about working a 24-hour day and not leaving the newsroom until it was time to go to The Shack for huevos rancheros. Today, the editors tell the reporters to stay out of the office until 2 p.m. on Election Day. It's not unheard of for them to be home before midnight, with the results already rolling off the press. Wimps!

Where's the fun in that? You have to stay at your desk until at least 2 a.m. before you catch that second wind that allows a reporter to remain semi-coherent until dawn.

I can recall one year when the election results were so late that when they finally arrived in the newsroom, a previous editor, under extreme duress, wrote the final vote tallies into the results box by hand with a marking pen and sent them to camera. The final results weren't pretty, but at least the news was on the street.

There was a good deal of turnover in Routt County commissioner seats in the mid-1980s, a trend that kept us up late on election night.

In 1984 (the same year that the ski area built the Rendezvous Saddle restaurant and Sunshine Bowl), Routt County Republicans gave the heave-ho to a pair of respected Democrats. Republican Billy Mack surprised incumbent Bob McKune by a margin of 3,315 to 2,887, and Paul Kenney defeated Pat Holderness of Hayden, 3,673 to 2,555.

That was the year the Reagan-Bush ticket out-polled Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro 3,795 to 1,877 in Routt County.

Mack would not last very long at the courthouse. He had tempestuous relationships with the county staff, and voters recalled him by a two-to-one margin in November 1986. That was another long night, as Democrat Tim Wirth narrowly won a U.S. Senate battle over Republican Ken Kramer. Wirth's margin of victory in Routt County was 10 votes.

One needn't go further than 2000 to uncover a pretty grueling election night.

Professors of political science and network news anchors may never get over the presidential election of 2000, when we all went to bed not knowing who our next president would be - George W. Bush or Al Gore. As I recall, one network projected Gore as the winner in early evening. When that call was reversed and Bush was declared the apparent winner, Gore called him to concede, only to call back later and recant. Then there was some stuff about the Supreme Court, and you know how it all turned out.

It was also on election night 2000 that I found myself stuck with a frustrating non-result in Colorado House District 57. Elk River Valley rancher Jay Fetcher and Winter Park businessman Al White faced off in a very close race. But I was still sitting at my desk at 3 a.m., begging election clerks in Jackson County and the city of Carbondale to give me a break.

By 2:30 a.m., White was thought to be ahead by 468 votes out of 29,000 cast.

Votes yet to be counted were in Jackson County, where Walden is the only town, and White had a lead with about 25 percent of the votes counted.

The other votes hanging in the pre-dawn murk were in three precincts in Carbondale, where Fetcher had a lead with 15 percent of the votes counted.

We finally gave up and sent the newspaper to press without knowing who our next state representative would be. There's not much you can do when the election clerk in Carbondale says her staff is going home to bed and won't finish counting the votes until later in the morning.

I went home for a few hours of sleep, returned to the office at 10 a.m. and typed a story reporting White's victory for the newspaper's Web page.

That would not have happened in the 1980s. With just one weekly edition, we wouldn't have had another opportunity to report the election news until seven days had passed.

Election night drama has changed with the years, but the huevos rancheros at The Shack are still winners by a landslide.