Eli5 – How are news channels able to project a winner in elections with a very small percentage of votes counted?
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The most basic thing is statistical analysis. I don’t need to flip a coin until it wears out to know if it’s a fair coin or not: about 100 flips will give me a good guess if it’s close to fair – and if it’s obviously not fair, that will show up. In the same way, it only takes less than 1000 people to get a good idea of how an election will go if you randomly sample people.
However, you can do better by NOT randomly sampling people, and instead intelligently sample people. This takes a lot more work, but the general idea is that you want to ask people who represent the people who are going to vote. I can’t explain this well because I haven’t looked into it as much, but there are ways to do this.
The last thing you can do is look for trends. If you’re seeing a lot more women vote, that’s going to mean something in close elections where one candidate has a lot more women voting for them. If you see moderate voters voting for one candidate over another, that’s going to mean something – and it’s going to mean more if you see moderate voters in multiple elections all leaning the same way. These trends can also help guide your intelligent sampling: maybe you need to ask more women how they’re voting if more women are voting.
And there’s a lot of math behind all of this – some of which is still new, and not really well understood (even by the people doing it – AI generates results that are like that some times).
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