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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 stat
by 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 agoFor 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 agoLet'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.