Factually, at what time did network TV begin to call it for Trump?

[Velocity]

@aldiboronti

Why? What difference would it have made? Everyone knew the election results in Florida were being challenged. The fact that the networks had called it for Bush was completely irrelevant.

It was called for Gore long before it was called for Bush.

[amarinth]

Coming from the west coast - I was still at work when some of the east coast returns started to come in and a few states were called.

Remember, not only do we have different time zones, but because elections are run locally, different states can have different hours. South Carolina closes at 7, North Carolina closes at 7:30, Georgia closes at 7 - unless you live in a big city that closes at 8, Iowa stays open until 9. And they’re counted locally as well (usually by county) - so a county with only a thousand or so people can report right after the polls close, while the larger counties take a while (the smallest county in my state had just under 1300 ballots. the largest had over 3 million).
So on election day, the small counties will start to report right after the polls close. And that goes straight to news media. The networks publish the count at that time along with how much has been counted - so we’ll see something like “X% candidate A. Y% candidate B. with 3 out of 100 precincts reporting” for each state. Each news organization has a different standard for when they’ll call a state for a candidate. Their goal is to be first to call and not to have to say later “we were wrong” (especially after what happened in 2000) so they’ll tend to hedge their bets until they’re reasonably sure that the state is going one way or the other. They won’t call the election until a candidate actually has 270 electoral votes. With the election map the way it is now and Democratic candidates needing those west coast votes to hit 270, it tends to be called a little bit later for a Democrat than for a Republican.

The other thing to note is 2 of the west coast states vote by mail and the third (CA) was 57% absentee this time around. So “how much time was left to vote” is even less straightforward of a question.

[Kent_Clark]

@Velocity

Yes, voters have stopped voting before, or voter turnout been depressed, by a state being called early for a candidate.

But the news organizations DON’T call a state until all the polls in that state have closed (Yes, sometimes they used to in states that straddled two time zones, but they don’t anymore.) And they also don’t call a national winner until the polls on the West Coast and Hawaii (the polls close at 6:00 local time there, so it’s 8:00 p.m. on the WC.)

Is your position that no race be called anywhere until polls have closed everywhere because someone might not vote?

[Lord_Feldon]

@Velocity

If Trump is leading by 100,000 votes in Pennsylvania, and there are fewer than 100,000 votes remaining, then the state should be called for Trump. If there are still, say, 300,000 votes yet uncounted, then the state should not be called.

How do they know how many votes are remaining when they haven’t counted them yet? The number of ballots issued, etc., isn’t necessarily tabulated before the votes are counted.

If it’s really so important, regulating “calling” is a pretty ineffectual way to do it, especially since it won’t apply to foreign media. Even if it was at all constitutional to prohibit opinions about election results, they’d just outsource it to the BBC and report on “the BBC is reporting…” rather than “we are calling…” Unless it would become illegal to report on what a foreign news outlet said regarding a Forbidden Topic, which is another dangerous road to go down.