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American here. This process is fairly normal and we will know the actual outcome once the electors vote. In many elections we know early on election day because

American here. This process is fairly normal and we will know the actual outcome once the electors vote. In many elections we know early on election day because the winners lead is really clear. I also learned history from books and not movies. I would still recommend some movies to someone who wants to learn the basics in a couple hours, but movies always take liberties with the truth in order to tell a story.

StavrosK 6y ago
> This process is fairly normal and we will know the actual outcome once the electors vote Right but this is a fairly convoluted way to do elections, no?
- kube-system 6y ago
  A federation of states is a fairly convoluted way to organize a government. Unitary states are without a doubt, simpler. But, simplicity was never, and still isn’t, a top priority. The priority was for the member states to have control over parts of the elections process.
  - pavlov 6y ago
    Germany is a federation too and doesn’t have this problem. American elections are stuck with 18th century assumptions because the ruling parties have no incentives to fix them together.
    - kube-system 6y ago
      I don’t know much about Germany’s elections, but from the Wikipedia page, it sounds like their constituent states have much less power to set election rules than states in the US. What “problem” are you referring to?
- nkohari 6y ago
  Yes, but it is as-designed, and only affects our presidential elections. Sometimes the US acts as a single nation, and sometimes it acts as a federation of states. In this case it's the latter. American media will only project the winner of an election once a sufficient number of votes are tallied that the outcome is clear. The alternative would be to wait for weeks until all ballots (absentee/mail-in, overseas/military, provisional, etc.) are counted. Is this actually not done in other nations?
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    For us, we wait until every vote is counted, so we usually only know the result for sure the next morning. We "only" have 10m people, but I would expect the amount of election workers to scale linearly with the amount of people, so I'd expect the duration to be fairly constant even with larger populations.
    - nkohari 6y ago
      Let's say it takes ~12 hours to tally ballots for your country (results are available the next morning). We have ~330M people in the USA, so if it scales linearly, the full count would take ~16.5 days. For what it's worth, most of the "long tail" time in counting votes in the US is due to special circumstances, like mail-in ballots which were damaged during delivery and need to be transcribed onto a new form before they can be run through the counting machines. Either way, projections are a fairly simple statistical exercise. Once enough votes from a district have been tallied such that you are confident that the statistical error wouldn't change the outcome, you can project a winner for that district. That is, if you collect a statistically significant sample such that your error is +/-X%, and a given candidate is winning by more than X%, you can project them as the winner.

StavrosK 6y ago

> This process is fairly normal and we will know the actual outcome once the electors vote Right but this is a fairly convoluted way to do elections, no?

kube-system 6y ago
A federation of states is a fairly convoluted way to organize a government. Unitary states are without a doubt, simpler. But, simplicity was never, and still isn’t, a top priority. The priority was for the member states to have control over parts of the elections process.
- pavlov 6y ago
  Germany is a federation too and doesn’t have this problem. American elections are stuck with 18th century assumptions because the ruling parties have no incentives to fix them together.
  - kube-system 6y ago
    I don’t know much about Germany’s elections, but from the Wikipedia page, it sounds like their constituent states have much less power to set election rules than states in the US. What “problem” are you referring to?
nkohari 6y ago
Yes, but it is as-designed, and only affects our presidential elections. Sometimes the US acts as a single nation, and sometimes it acts as a federation of states. In this case it's the latter. American media will only project the winner of an election once a sufficient number of votes are tallied that the outcome is clear. The alternative would be to wait for weeks until all ballots (absentee/mail-in, overseas/military, provisional, etc.) are counted. Is this actually not done in other nations?
- StavrosK 6y ago
  For us, we wait until every vote is counted, so we usually only know the result for sure the next morning. We "only" have 10m people, but I would expect the amount of election workers to scale linearly with the amount of people, so I'd expect the duration to be fairly constant even with larger populations.
  - nkohari 6y ago
    Let's say it takes ~12 hours to tally ballots for your country (results are available the next morning). We have ~330M people in the USA, so if it scales linearly, the full count would take ~16.5 days. For what it's worth, most of the "long tail" time in counting votes in the US is due to special circumstances, like mail-in ballots which were damaged during delivery and need to be transcribed onto a new form before they can be run through the counting machines. Either way, projections are a fairly simple statistical exercise. Once enough votes from a district have been tallied such that you are confident that the statistical error wouldn't change the outcome, you can project a winner for that district. That is, if you collect a statistically significant sample such that your error is +/-X%, and a given candidate is winning by more than X%, you can project them as the winner.