From my understanding most of the press data sources are just companies that wrote code to scrape the multiple state sources of data and/or interface with archa

From my understanding most of the press data sources are just companies that wrote code to scrape the multiple state sources of data and/or interface with archaic fax systems that sent counts from counting centers to central locations. I believe in some cases they had observers who took totals off the counting machines themselves. I believe the primary reason for them is that they got the data faster than the official websites.