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By The New York Times
- Nov. 7, 2022, 4:01 p.m. ET
We report vote totals provided by The Associated Press, which collects results from states, counties and townships through a network of websites and more than 4,000 on-the-ground correspondents. To estimate how many votes remain to be counted, our team of data journalists and software engineers gathers vote tallies directly from the websites of election officials and compares these with our turnout expectations.
For years, election results providers used the percentage of precincts reporting to help give readers a sense of how many votes remained to be counted. Not anymore. The rise of mail-in voting and early voting has made the measure all but useless in many states, since absentee votes are usually not counted by precinct. This has often left readers and analysts at a loss about how many votes remain to be counted. Even with precinct tallies, the percentage was often misleading. The number of voters can vary significantly from precinct to precinct. If a district has 10 precincts, results from two of those precincts does not mean 20 percent of the total vote has been counted.
This year, The Times will be publishing its own estimates in key races for the number of remaining votes based on how many people are likely to turn out. (For other races, we will use The A.P.’s turnout estimate.) We devise our estimate using several factors, including how many voters showed up in previous years and how many people voted early or requested absentee ballots this year. As results come in for each state or district, we readjust our estimates for remaining votes based on this incoming data. That means the number could change throughout the evening.
Our initial estimate is based on previous elections, but we can create a more accurate estimate on the fly as the vote tallies come in on election night. For example, if the vote totals for one county show higher turnout than our original estimates, our statistical model may reformulate the turnout estimate for a similar county to reflect what’s happening in real time more accurately.
Source: nytimes.com
