Webward Bound   

Former Associated Press Assistant Washington Bureau Chief Evans Witt remembers vividly the way elections used to be covered.

"In 1976, we had these red and blue cards that were used to track elections. Red was for Republicans, blue was for Democrats," he says. "Every 15 minutes, someone would call 'time,' and we would count the cards and then add up the numbers on a calculator."

It's easy for Witt, 44, to laugh at what passed for high technology back in the '70s now that he has a new vantage point from which to monitor today's state-of-the-art election coverage. As managing editor of ElectionLine , a new World Wide Web site created by Capital Cities / ABC , Newsweek and the Washington Post , Witt will get a firsthand look at the dizzying pace of election coverage in cyberspace.

Witt, who began his journalism career covering the Patty Hearst kidnapping for the AP in San Francisco in 1974, says he never would have left the wire, where he spent 22 years, if it weren't for the opportunity to get wired with ElectionLine.

The site offers "auditoriums" that will allow hundreds of PC users to converse electronically with candidates and the journalists covering them. ElectionLine visitors also will be able to download campaign commercials and get information about the evolution of the candidates' positions on various issues.

While all this cyberspace wizardry may be new to Witt, the demands of election-year coverage certainly are not. During his tenure at AP, he was the wire's national political writer for the 1984 and 1988 presidential elections, and he directed the AP/NBC News Poll, a joint venture that lasted from 1977 to 1983.

And while Witt says he has much to learn about computers, he says he's not worried. He feels his experience spearheading the AP's efforts to modernize election coverage has prepared him well. "Though it was difficult," he admits, "convincing old-timers that it was finally time to do away with the red and blue cards."