Lol, whut?

[Squee]

Look at all that Hawaii vote. <3

[TripMyHop]

Yeah still haven't found out much about results in my own state. The tally is still super low.

[Squee]

Jeremiah and I are just pouring over all the polls from news stations and are jsut going "Wha?..."

I don't understand how people can call states when only say 37% is reporting....

Politics..
What?

[TripMyHop]

Jeremiah and I are just pouring over all the polls from news stations and are jsut going "Wha?..."

I don't understand how people can call states when only say 37% is reporting....

Politics..
What?

I'm not really sure. By 50% or so you can see how the ratio might hold, but early on it seems ridiculous.

What I'm guessing is, the small/rural areas get finished counting first and since it's usual polarized by rural and urban, they predict huge numbers in urban centers to boost (or pad) a democratic percentage.

[Squee]

That makes sense.
I'm not going to try to wrap my head around it anymore.
If Jeremiah wants to, more power to him.
But what's done is done. I am not going to lose sleep over it.

Some of it is humorous though.
Like Hawaii. xD

[Jorick]

It's because they have a lot of other data to go on than just the actual voting results. There's the previous election results, any early voting, informal polls done by a variety of news sources and independent groups, etc. Then when results start coming in they can look at what precincts and districts the votes are coming from and see if they're matching up with all that data, like say if a state has a total of ~55% of its vote count so far going toward the Democrat but that's with almost all of the liberal districts reporting in and very few of the Republican areas counted yet they can still say "yup, that's gonna end up a Republican win." There's also exit polling, people at polling places asking people who they voted for and a variety of things about themselves and where they stand on issues to get an idea of the demographics, so they can also get some kind of idea of how the voting will turn out based on that.

Basically there's a shitload of other information being processed aside from the actual vote count, such that they were able to call a lot of states before they ever closed their polls but didn't because election etiquette. This is why swing states are a thing. Those states are the ones that the voting history and the polling and such don't indicate that one side is obviously going to win (like how California is always called for the Democrat candidate in advance and Texas is always called for the Republican candidate in advance). All the pre-election data just leaves it too close to call so they're the swing votes.