Elections Overview

For media organizations, covering an election is one of the most challenging and complex production undertakings. Getting accurate results on the air and using those results to tell a compelling story is an essential part of the editorial mission. The Chameleon election feature provides all the necessary data, editorial and graphic management tools to ensure that media organizations of any size, working in any platform can produce a competitive and engaging production.

Chameleon Elections is designed to produce ANY kind of election for any office; winner-take-all, list proportional, multi-winner ranked and two-round. The solution is also equipped to handle propositions and referendums.

Chameleon is designed to accommodate lower third “ticker” style election results and/or full frame election results graphics.

Chameleon Elections is used as a pre-production solution to organize various election elements, an editorial solution to track and analyse election results and to manage and playout graphic templates to air.

Chameleon supports output to SDI, NDI and HTML5.

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Pre-Production

Months or weeks before election night, producers can begin to ingest important visual content into Chameleon Elections.

Part of the pre-production process is the gathering and preparation of candidate headshots. It is typically the media organization’s responsibility to acquire candidate headshots. Often the headshots are crafted by the media organization’s graphic department to give them a distinctive look and/or cropping to match the overall look of the election broadcast. link

Similarly, party logos and party colours can be added to create a more engaging and comprehensive UI presentation for producers tracking the election.

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Chameleon can also ingest the editorial team’s notes, historical information, candidate biographies, commentary and directions creating an “election bible’ that can be accessed by the entire election staff.

As the broadcast is planned, producers can consider and create interesting playlists of races to follow. Producers may consider several editorial factors to base these decisions such as potential tight races, potential upsets, geography, voter demographics, issue driven races, fate of incumbents, etc.

Learn more about preparing for an Elections

Template Creation

Another important pre-production function is the creation of graphic templates. Depending on the election project and how graphics will ultimately be played out, the design and creation of templates may come from an outside graphic design firm or be created by an in-house team. Chameleon comes with a sophisticated design tool called “Designer” which is used to both create graphic templates to work within Chameleon. It is within Designer that templates are connected to data, animations are created, and scene properties are managed. Designer can also accommodate SD, HD and custom resolutions.

Learn more about Chameleon Designer

Data Ingest

There are two ways election data populates Chameleon Elections:

1. Automated Data Feeds

Election authorities aggregate election results and related data and make it available as a data feed that updates automatically. Chameleon readers read these feeds, parse the data, and populate the Chameleon Election system. Data feeds may come from services such as Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ) or the Associated Press (AP) or they may come from county or regional election authorities in the form of RSS or XML feeds. Chameleon can handle data feeds from ANY source. Bannister Lake or the end user may have to build specific readers to capture data, but data can come from anywhere.

Typically, services such as DDHQ and AP will transmit data a few weeks before the election to ensure media organizations can test, run rehearsals and ensure structural data integrity.

Also note historical election data from results providers can be ingested into Chameleon Elections creating editorial opportunities to contrast and compare previous results.

Learn more about Elections Readers

  2. Manual Data Entry

Chameleon Elections allows producers to manually enter election results. If automated data feeds are not available, too expensive, or not practical, the editorial team may choose to enter results directly into Chameleon. In a situation where an automated data feed fails, it is possible to switch between manual entry and then switch back the automated data when it is restored. 

Production:

On election night, two important related editorial processes take place using Chameleon Elections:

1. Election Race Tracking

Producers select the contest they wish to follow and track results. As the election authorities aggregate and distribute results, the readers will bring the results into Chameleon Elections. Opening the Election Results tab will show all the races and candidates running. Producers can now track races, utilizing their playlists and scenarios drawn up in pre-production as well as identify real-time trends, upsets and other newsworthy events. Producers can use Chameleon’s filtering tools to focus their view or create multiple windows tabs to track multiple races.

1. Creation of Graphic Playlists:

Once producers identify races of interest, a set of races can be selected and become graphic rundowns for playout. To speed this process up, Chameleon Elections’, Rundown feature (located on the left side of the UI) allows producers to instantly turn interesting races into graphics. By selecting the races to be added to the graphics list and then hitting Rundown graphic lists can be built quickly and made available instantly for inclusion into the broadcast.

Each Rundown is given a name and placed in a virtual bin. Often producers are assigned a bin where their rundowns will reside. Broadcasts may be organized so that specific producers may be responsible for certain editorial election content that will become a graphic rundown. For example, a producer may be assigned to “star candidates” or “bell weather races” or “southeast states”. Producers would create graphic rundowns of interests specific to these subjects.

Graphic Playout

Graphic rundowns built by producers instantly become available to the graphic playout operator. The operator uses Chameleon election player software to manage and playout the graphic rundowns. Then operator can quickly locate the appropriate bin, select the corresponding rundowns and load the graphics. When cued by the broadcast director, the operator can “take” the first graphic in the rundown sequence. Using the player, the operator can also quickly change the order of graphics, add captions to them, change graphics automatically, and loop rundowns.  

Blade

Chameleon’s RESTful API, BLADE, plays an important role in election coverage. All election data can be customized and reformatted via the API. This allows other systems to pick up the election data and extend the broadcaster’s reach to other platforms and other devices. Through BLADE, customized election results can be made available for social media, digital signage, websites, mobile applications, web widgets, on-set displays or augmented reality solutions.