Eli5 – How are news channels able to project a winner in elections with a very small percentage of votes counted?
In: 4
Election polls are done from long out until right before the election (and then actually after people do vote too!). They already know the outcome of most elections before the election ever takes place for the most part anyways, and the votes coming in just confirms what they already knew or they make slight changes to their predictions, but generally they already know pretty close to what to expect and what the outcome is
They know how they expect people to vote, they know how people and areas have voted in the past, and they expect those all to be pretty similar again to how they are going to vote now (along with polls to confirm, yup its happening).
Using some statistics and info they expect to be true, they can generally get a pretty high confidence in the outcome without a large amount of votes actually counted, as they see a ew pieces falling into place, they can see where the rest of the pieces are highly likely to fall as well.
As a side note, generally most elections aren’t all that close either. Most elections strongly favor one candidate winning.
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