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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 amo
by 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 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.