@Bagadverts
Hi
I’m British but quite a few American relatives praying (and voting) for a Biden win. I have a couple of questions that google hasn’t answered for me - can you help?
Do the official networks have any cut off on political coverage. Here there isn’t political reporting on the day of the election until the polls close. I presume it won’t stop non official stuff on Twitter anyway.
do proper count figures get released as they go along in each county/state? I’m confused how it can look like a Trump win until paper ballots are added - where are the networks getting figures to call a state if they have only counted part of the vote (absentee/in person)?
Here's how votes are actually counted in a couple of locations
www.azcleanelections.gov/election-security/how-votes-are-counted
www.nbcnews.com/specials/election-voting-ballot/
This year we have a very unusually high number of early votes. In some states those have been opened, verified as accepted or not, and some run through a scanner. In those states you can expect to see those numbers included in the early released vote counts.
In other states they have not been opened, or verified, so they still have that process to go through. In some of those states they have specifically decided to count in-person votes first, so that's what you'll see in the early vote counts.
This article talks about which states count which ways, when to expect to see results, and whether you're likely to see a shift from one party to the other as a result.
projects.fivethirtyeight.com/election-results-timing/
In my state, they tend to get results from the bigger towns and cities earlier, while the smaller towns, plantations, townships and unorganized territories (yes really) tend to send their results to the state capitol to be counted, and come in much later. Some are flown in from the islands. That usually results in a shift from Democrat to Republican as the evening progresses.
To add on to that confusion, in past elections, especially in areas that are clearly swinging one way or the other, the media will poll people as they leave the ballot area, and ask how they voted, then use that to predict who will win the election.
Sometimes it's just really obvious who won from very early on.
I'd imagine there will be less of that this year, because you can't assume that the people voting in person are a representative sample of all party affiliations.