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P0Rt1ng4Duty t1_ivmrxl5 wrote

If they know how many votes were cast in total and one candidate gets more than half that number, the remaining votes can't turn into a win for the other candidate.

If ten people voted on what to get for lunch and the first six votes are for pizza, you know pizza's for lunch.

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heelllooooooo OP t1_ivmt07h wrote

I get that, but if the 10 people that voted are only 15% of the people coming lunch, then what?

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SkiingAway t1_ivmwcto wrote

It's not 15% of the ballots randomly distributed across the state.

It's typically that some places have reported all or nearly all of their votes, some haven't reported anything yet. We know how those places have voted in past elections and how their demographics are (or aren't) similar to other places in the state.

Have enough of those, and you have a pretty good picture of how the state is voting. And if they're running ahead of the numbers they were expected to need to win in those various places....odds are that's going to happen in the unknowns as well.

Example:

Imagine Portsmouth has voted D+20 as an average of the past couple elections, and Dover has voted D+15.

If you have 100% of the vote in for Portsmouth, and it's only D+10, Dover is probably D+5, and it more generally suggests Dems are doing far worse than usual. If the overall race was supposed to be D+2, statewide you might be looking at R+3.

(in reality, you would want a bunch of different kinds of places to make these sorts of inferences for the state overall).

This is also how you can get calls while the actual counted votes are the still opposite of who they're calling it for. - because they're way underperforming where they need to rack up votes, even if they're ahead in the total count at that time.

It's pretty rare for major media outlets to miscall races. Not non-existent, but uncommon.

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5nd t1_ivmsm57 wrote

Yeah but 15% isn't enough to do that, they just guess. Media isn't official they're just estimating.

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