I’ve never understood the dewy beats Truman calling system. In the UK each constituency announces results after being counted (and recounted). Those results arrive during the night, polls close at 10, first results at 11, a good idea of who will win in most elections by 5, andthe last few results might stretch into 9 or 10 am if ferries are having issues.
But aside from a national exit poll at 10pm, there are no real guesses.
It seems that different US elections predict who will win a given state far earlier in the process - before the votes are counted even the first time. Is that right?
My own global broadcaster takes its “calls” from ABC. I think that abc, nbc, cbs, Fox, cnn, New York Times and Washington post are probably good enough for “calling it”. I was working election night 2012 in our Washington office and was shocked how early the “Obama wins” straps went up -I have a photo at just 23:19 eastern from fox saying Obama was re-elected. That’s something like 4 hours before polls close in Alaska and Hawaii!
If 4 of those networks and papers have called it then it’s likely good. Sure there’s buzzfeed and whatever that may have enough professional staff on to really judge it, but it’s unlikely that 3 networks and a major paper are all going to call Dewy rather than Truman.
That's how it's done in most countries in Europe as well in my experience. To be clear in the end it's not what the media say that matters, it's the certified vote counts but those come in often much later. In this case I believe that some states like Alaska will be counting ballots well into next week.
It makes sense to call the race once the lead is considered significant enough that the remaining ballots can't statistically change the outcome.
A good counterexample in this election is Arizona, that's been called early for Biden by some outlets (AP and Fox News IIRC) but is still considered to be potentially winnable by Trump by the others. In this case it is possible that AP and Fox were a bit too trigger happy.
No, that’s never been a requirement for news media. California was called within 10 minutes of polls closing because it was expected to be a mathematical improbability of a Republican win in that state. Whenever a state gets called (and inevitably therefore the presidency), it is done because the math nerds at the media organizations put the odds of the other party winning outside the realm of what can realistically be achieved in the opinion of the analysts. There is no legal requirement to be eventually correct in your calls.
There will probably be another General Election in the UK this year. This chooses which party will be in government (almost certainly Labour this time) and who therefore will be Prime Minister (almost certainly Keir Starmer).
On the day, the polls close at 10pm, and the first results come in about an hour later (Sunderland South holds the record at 10:48pm). The whole thing is effectively done by about 4am - 6am the next morning, depending on how close it is.
That's why I don't understand why in US presidential elections, it takes weeks to get the result. Why isn't it done overnight? The uncertainty doesn't seem to help at all.
Because history and polls essentially show that the other candidate winning that state is impossible. They wait until voting closes in that state before calling it as a courtesy. The majority of states could have been called weeks in advance.
Once it became clear that the election wouldn't be called on election night, was there really any benefit to making an early call? Whether it was called on Thursday or Saturday seems kind of irrelevant when inauguration isn't until January.
This election is an anomaly and should not be considered the norm. But there's also some confusion where winners get announced before the total counting is done. They are just announced when there is believed to be statistical certainty. A nation wide (full) recount is not happening in a few hours and if it was I would expect it to have a decent error margin. The UK also doesn't have as many options on the ballots as the US you have president, house, senate, judges, reps, measures, state constitution amendments, etc. You can't make a one to one comparison.
The media calling the election has no legal force. In principle, they look at the results and call the election once they think it's highly unlikely that a particular candidate can lose. Sometimes that call is badly made, like Florida 2000 or, IMO, Fox calling Arizona prematurely. But it's misinforming viewers to claim that all candidates still have a chance after some point in time.
The Decision Desk call would have taken into account plausible degrees of variation due to recounts. It probably could have been called several hours ago. It seems that at this point we're past 'very likely'.
Wonder if this is because the concern of a delay for counting the results? I wonder if true it might take days or even weeks to find out who won... so I could see suspending it while waiting for results. This is surely an election and year for the history books. Kinda been feeling like I‘ve been living in some movie this year.
The case I think you're talking about (DNC v WSL) was literally about whether or not state legislatures can decide when to require ballots. Wisconsin's legislature decided election day. A lower court said this was unconstitutional, but it's not, so the majority opinion was for WSL.
Please show me where in this opinion the assertion was made that election results must be called by TV networks on election night.
That has also been true of every election in the past that has been called by the media before the election has been formally certified. In a typical election, the media would call it, the loser would offer up a concession speech, and only then the winner would declare victory. Even Hillary did that back in 2016, it probably won’t happen like that in 2020 for the first time in recent history for reasons.
It was. But even with "waiting until after the election to know who won" you want to know who won by breakfast the next day. Would anything actually go wrong if you waited a day or three?
Same in situation in Germany. Polls close at 18:00 and 18:01 everybody knows the general results. It will only change by ~0.1% over the next 1-2 days and only really matters if a party is close to the 5% hurdle.
Twenty years ago, we could count on results the same night of the election, and in our town/city election night was always a party night - everybody involved in the campaigns would gather in a convention center where the local news orgs would live broadcast, the surrounding bars would be packed, and usually by 10-11pm, winners would be known.
Somehow, twenty years in the future, we don't know results until weeks after the election, and auditability/transparency sucks.
Don't think it was so much desperate as you don't want to make an early call on the presidency without being sure. They acknowledged that they didn't really see a path, but wanted to get specific info in (like absentee ballot numbers) first before making the official call. Some states still haven't been calling half a day later.
the result was definitely not certain. there was more outstanding votes than the leader's margin, and it wasn't clear what the composition of those votes was. it was definitely very likely that they would follow the trend of the rest of the state, but it could have come to pass that the late-arriving absentee ballots or provisionals in PA broke very differently to the early-arriving absentee ballots. They called it when the first sample of outstanding allegheny county ballots were counted and made it clear that the rest of those votes were going to trend as expected.
the networks have to balance a late call giving fodder to conspiracy theorists with an early or uncertain call also giving fodder to conspiracy theorists. they don't want to be doing anything that could promote a narrative claiming the networks are trying to influence the election for biden.
But aside from a national exit poll at 10pm, there are no real guesses.
It seems that different US elections predict who will win a given state far earlier in the process - before the votes are counted even the first time. Is that right?
My own global broadcaster takes its “calls” from ABC. I think that abc, nbc, cbs, Fox, cnn, New York Times and Washington post are probably good enough for “calling it”. I was working election night 2012 in our Washington office and was shocked how early the “Obama wins” straps went up -I have a photo at just 23:19 eastern from fox saying Obama was re-elected. That’s something like 4 hours before polls close in Alaska and Hawaii!
If 4 of those networks and papers have called it then it’s likely good. Sure there’s buzzfeed and whatever that may have enough professional staff on to really judge it, but it’s unlikely that 3 networks and a major paper are all going to call Dewy rather than Truman.
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