Election Day!

November 19 was the day of municipal elections across B.C. As a journalist, I've worked only a couple of elections: midterm elections in Kentucky and the 2011 federal election in Canada. The Kentucky election left me a little terrified because I was expected to produce an entire newscast of results and I had no idea how to. I think I'm still a little scarred from the experience. The federal election from earlier this year was not too bad. I learned how to somewhat juggle the elements of social media while updating the CHBC News website.

Which is why when I realized the full weight of November 19, I was pretty nervous and excited and scared. It was a day of mixed emotions really. The thing was elections is that they are live. As in, results are being counted as you work. Results are being updated, races can change based on what happens in each polling station. For about an hour after polls closed, I was just re-freshing the results page for the City of Kelowna if not every second minute then about every minute.

It's these types of things that make it really exciting to be a journalist. You are one of the first to know when things happen and it's your job to figure out what it means. For me, in the case of the Kelowna elections, it was candidate A has just passed candidate B in votes. That means we have a new mayor, that means three years of (insert candidate platform). It's a rush, it's a huge adrenaline rush. That's probably why most journalists are journalists. We love the rush. Or the stress. One or the other. But either way, it's terribly intoxicating.