Ask HN: How do news networks get election data?
Seems like they have a live data feed...
Some news organizations will have their own staff checking results, especially in areas where it is known that the results will be slow and the results are going to be within polling error margins.
You'd think the data could be crowd-sourced more effectively, but private citizens get the data more slowly for a few reasons ... First is that there is red tape involved in obtaining the data (i.e. forms to fill out, fees to pay and it all must be done ahead of time) and second is that after-hours early access to data is just plain limited logistically. If it could be efficiently delivered to a large quantity of people, it would be presented online.
There are a few areas where the government decides that it's more efficient to let private parties distribute data, and it's generally pretty good business to become one of those parties. NMVTIS data comes to mind immediately (carfax and it's competitors), but there are many similar instances.
It's a very difficult operation, with state-by-state rules and some precincts that don't exactly want journalists hanging around all night.
Disclaimer: Work for Reuters News.
For realtime data, I think the political people and press show up in person. I went with my cousin once. Some clerk taped a sheet on the wall.
"Shortly before the polls close, over 4,000 stringers report to county election centers. When the first polls close, they’ll be ready to start phoning in the raw vote as it is reported by the counties. They’ll place their calls to AP election centers around the country.
At the centers, a total of over 800 vote entry clerks will answer those calls, and walk each stringer through a dialogue as they enter the number of precincts reporting and the candidates’ votes into our election night system. "
I wrote a script to retrieve the live vote data from Google (i.e. AP) for my chat bot, because I hadn't had the time to find out how the AP API works.
Sample output (a few hours ago):
[["electoral vote","Trump 150 (120 needed) — Clinton 109 (161 needed)"],["popu lar vote","Trump 49% (35,302,284) — Clinton 47% (33,652,539)"],["progress","47 % reporting"]]
Sample output (now; notice that needed electoral votes is changed to total popular votes):
[["electoral vote","Trump 276 (57,246,646 votes) — Clinton 218 (56,294,331 votes)"],["popular vote","Trump 48% (57,246,646) — Clinton 47% (56,294,331)"],["progress","88% reporting" ]]
The AP has writeups of their process too:
They pay $50 for someone to go to the county and report the election results. There's an iphone, android, and mobile web site, as well as a call center that takes that input.
Honestly, it was a really fun evening in the middle of nowhere Ohio...
When I was there, it was me and a college student from the local college who was there working for the AP awaiting the results; everyone else was getting them online.
I was there in 2008 and '12 and there are usually representatives from both state parties, both county parties, and the larger campaigns.
https://codeforphilly.org/blog/vote_and_watch_whowonphilly
Disclaimer: I work in philly's city government. It's really cool, and we'll soon be hiring a product manager (for beta.phila.gov), a data engineer (for open data), and a front-end/wordpress developer.
In Illinois I registered to vote well before the deadline. I showed up to cast my ballot but my name wasn't in the "database." The folks managing the polling station had to manually re-enter all my details into an Android tablet. While this was happening, I took out my phone and scanned the WiFi network of the church I was in. I assume the tablets were connected via wifi. I saw no other connection to the tablet besides a power connection. To my surprised the WIFI was running WEP. Hmm, this day in age you would think WEP would be default=off. This was at a local Church too. So perhaps the tablets use cellular data plans?
They get all my PII data entered, I get my ballot, fill it out, and pass it through a machine. The machine is in the corner of the building in a large box so I can't tell if it's hardwired to some network or using the wifi.
Later that day (about an hour later after re-entering my details into the Android tablet) I went to the Illinois voter registration web site to look up my name and I can find my details.
Anyone have any information on the tablet software? Who writes it? How it's transmitted and stored? What about the electronic ballot counting machines? Are the phoning home some where?
The whole setup seems sketchy to me.
As an aside: I know a couple people who have homes in different states and claim they can cast multiple votes by driving/flying to the state where they have 2nd home to cast a 2nd ballot.
In the UK at least we aren't meant to release the results until the returning officer reads them out so waiting for any of the above while showing a live feed of a result would mean we don't have the result to show on screen immediately. For this reason you would likely also have people in the studio watching the live feeds from counts and entering the numbers which would then be double checked against the official feed later. This can be tricky when the result is drowned out by cheering from a crowd of supporters! ie "Labout party, John Candidate 22 thousand... <WOOOOOO - YEAAAH> ...hundred and 1 votes"
The focus for news orgs is getting these results out accurately before their competitors, no one wants to be slow to announce the results.
In addition to all those, there is Oy ve Otesi, a non-profit does the entire thing with only volunteer work. Their coverage is pretty minimal in rural areas, though.
We transfer and process them, for national races we we the AP Election API
You could delay it a little but live updates is kind of a bad idea.
Minutely or hourly updates might be kind of cool but yeah bandwagoning would be an issue.
I see this as a pro not a con. I want to be reassured that my vote was counted correctly. That is way more important to me than keeping my vote secret from anyone in the room.
This was a big issue in Florida during the 2000 election. The panhandle of Florida is in the Central Time Zone and polls are open 1 hour later than other parts. The state was called for Al Gore while the polls were still open in the more "Red" panhandle area [0] and there were rumors is skewed the results or caused people to not go out and vote since the state had already been decided. [1]
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/08/us/the-2000-elections-the-... [1] [1]
Sounds like you're thinking of the exit polls, but I think OP was asking about the actual vote counts as they're reported from individual precincts.
basically it says it is based on exit poll. and it is costly, so many media companies formed an entity called NationalElection Pool to do the report.
And they also hired a company called Edison Research to do the exit poll.
See others for what actually happens. There's reporters sitting at county clerk offices.
Twitter really needs to go ahead and embrace that it doesn't need to be facebook: it's key forte is being an easy to use ultra-fast realtime information distribution system.