At what time on November 2 will the media start to release election results? Will they be released at different times in different areas? Where can results be heard/seen first? Is there any time difference between TV, radio, internet, ect.?
Media results on the day of the election will begin varying by the station or location, but you should understand their results are based on exit polls and are only a small random sampling of the voter base so they are not 100% accurate. They open with the East coast and close with the west coast.
As for the best places to follow, I suspect TV will be best as it has the largest finances to back it and to provide the biggest team(s) of people working to keep the world up to date.
In the past, the networks have always refrained from releasing any results, predictions, etc. for a state until the polls have closed in that state. So a little after 8:00 ET we start to see poll results for the states on the east coast. At 9:00 ET we see the results from the midwest, etc.
Even though they have exit poll data that has been gathered throughout the day, they wait until the polls are closed to broadcast it. AFAIK there is no law requiring this, but they hold back out of courtesy to those who have not yet voted.
Exit polls are not to be confused with actual vote counts. These start to trickle in as soon as the polls close and are the results that you see updated on the big maps in the studio. When the statisticians at the network determine that there are enough precincts from the proper areas of the state to give a valid sample, the network will predict a winner for that state and add the electoral votes to the appropriate column. Occasionally this backfires (like it did in the 2000 election) and they have to reverse their call for one or two states as more data comes in.
This process is particularly frustrating to those who live on the west coast, or in Alaska and Hawaii, since most of the time the networks have already predicted a winner before these people get home from work and have a chance to get to the polls.
For local elections, yes. But for the national elections, the results are not released until the polls in Alaska and Hawaii have closed.
The official results are not released until all the votes have been counted, which may be days or weeks after the election, but the networks are most happy to make their predictions when as few as 1% of the precints have reported in many instances.
The major networks and newspaper wire services formed a consortium to share the cost of gathering election returns, and get the same returns at the same time. Technically, the only difference in who reports first is who actually puts that set of numbers up first.
Where the differences come in is 1) reporting of your local and state returns, where your local newspaper may have someone down at the election office who gets the results immediately, while the local TV station waits for the results to be reported to the state cpaitol and then reported back by the wie service and
- voter analysis and projections. When the networks, etc. get the raw votes, they have their teams of statisticians and analysts go over them, compare them with the private exit polls they conducted during the day, the numbers they had from that area in the last election, etc. They may hold off updating a vote total until the numbers-wonk-in-charge figures out what it means and explains it to the anchor, who then tries to put it in comprehensible terms for the rest of us.
As noted, sometimes they screw it up royally. It will be interesting to see how fast they are with predictions after what happened in 2000.
Well, the official results are not released until the President of the Senate opens and announces, in the presence of the Senate and the House of Representatives, the certificates of the ballots of the slates of electors of the several states.
They just announced them yesterday, from 2000. Al Gore won.
Drudge Report should have leaked exit polls at around 1 PM or so, based on past elections.
I wonder how they’re going to handle exit polls in Florida this year. Florida is letting people vote early, so any exit polls from election day may have a bias.
Oregon has vote-by-mail, although lots of people turn their ballots in to the various drop off places on election day instead of mailing them in. But as far as I know, they don’t poll these people. And because they don’t have exit polls in Oregon, it was the last non-disputed state that the media declared a winner in. The fact that Multnomah County was taking so long to count their ballots was a factor, too. But that, in turn, was due to the last day surge of ballots being dropped off.
Though people think they were, the exit polls in Florida were not wrong. The problem was that people reported who they thought they voted for. Since the butterfly ballot confused a large number of people, many thought they were voting for Gore but were actually voting for Buchanan. That problem made all the difference.