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Comment by finikytou | Hacker News Reader

foreigner here. it is crazy to see that americans do not know when is the official result of their own election and what is written in their own constitution.

That leads me to the second question. In europe we learn history at school and in books but most of my encounters with educated americans led them to recommend me some hollywood movies to learn about some specific events of their history.

I feel the television has a huge importance in this country and the fact that millions of americans consider it the source of truth even to declare who is the winner of the most important event of their lives strikes me as unbelievable.

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American here. This process is fairly normal and we will know the actual outcome once the electors vote. In many elections we know early on election day because the winners lead is really clear.

I also learned history from books and not movies. I would still recommend some movies to someone who wants to learn the basics in a couple hours, but movies always take liberties with the truth in order to tell a story.

> This process is fairly normal and we will know the actual outcome once the electors vote

Right but this is a fairly convoluted way to do elections, no?

A federation of states is a fairly convoluted way to organize a government. Unitary states are without a doubt, simpler. But, simplicity was never, and still isn’t, a top priority.

The priority was for the member states to have control over parts of the elections process.

Germany is a federation too and doesn’t have this problem. American elections are stuck with 18th century assumptions because the ruling parties have no incentives to fix them together.

I don’t know much about Germany’s elections, but from the Wikipedia page, it sounds like their constituent states have much less power to set election rules than states in the US.

What “problem” are you referring to?

Yes, but it is as-designed, and only affects our presidential elections. Sometimes the US acts as a single nation, and sometimes it acts as a federation of states. In this case it's the latter.

American media will only project the winner of an election once a sufficient number of votes are tallied that the outcome is clear. The alternative would be to wait for weeks until all ballots (absentee/mail-in, overseas/military, provisional, etc.) are counted.

Is this actually not done in other nations?

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.

Let'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.

Most Americans consider the official certification of the election to be a formal ceremony, not an active part of the process. It's like pointing out that the UK Prime Minister is actually appointed at the Queen's sole discretion.

I'm sorry, are you actually suggesting that US schools don't teach history or civics? Based entirely on your experience of Americans recommending movies to you?

It would be tempting to suggest that European schools fail to teach critical thinking, but I'll resist that urge, as it's obviously unfair. Your comment doesn't suggest to me a failure of European schools, the problem is likely much more specific.

That's a silly take IMO. I don't know where you're from but news outlet projections are taken as the de-facto actual result of the elections until the official counts are certified, often days or even weeks later. Note that these projections (in France and the USA) come from official, if only partial ballot counts.

The only actual decision the news outlets have to make is to decide when to call the win when they judge that the winner is statistically almost impossible to change.

In France for instance we get the first projections at 8PM sharp, once the last voting places close. Nobody, including the politicians involved, wait until the the final count to concede or celebrate their results.

The only "americanism" I can see here is this odd electoral college system that leads to absurd situations where ~100k people effectively decide the elections for everybody else, while hundreds of millions in non-swing-states effectively don't count. If there's something worthy of scorn and foreign arrogance, it's probably that.

that you want the electoral college of the united states to become the electoral college of the united new york and california is one belief that do not align with the idea of what is america. once again something you can learn in history books.

And no in france no media will declare a winner before being sure of it or they will withdraw it as soon as they see that the race isnt finished. again history should have taught them to be more prudent (gore/bush) but as they are partisan media they are just entitled to win.

I can't really come up with a reply to your comment that won't start a flame war. It's clear that the crux of the issue here is that you consider that at this very moment the American presidential race isn't "finished" and that it's partisan to say that it is. If you really believe that saying that Biden won the election is a partisan issue I don't think anything I could say would sway you at this point.

I would just like to point out that in 2000 Bush won Florida by 537 votes, currently Biden is ahead by over 10k votes in all the contested states, and even if the projections were wrong for any single one of them he would still win the electoral college. I do think the news outlets learned from 2000, otherwise they'd have called the race as soon as Pennsylvania and Georgia flipped. The situation is really not comparable to 2000 where the news networks called Florida for Gore before the last polling stations had even closed in the state[1].

Now if it turns out that there was indeed fraud then of course it could overturn everything, but not having any conclusive evidence of anything it makes sense for news outlets to proceed as usual I think. I mean even Fox News called the race at this point...

But even if we ignore these current events I still maintain that it's silly to expect the media (and all observers, including internationally) not to call the race when the numbers show that there's a clear winner. Maybe sometimes they'll get it wrong, but what's the alternative? Pretend that there's no winner for weeks waiting for the official count and you don't see the writing on the wall and precluding all analysis of the results? That would be rather silly.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...

> I feel the television has a huge importance in this country and the fact that millions of americans consider it the source of truth even to declare who is the winner of the most important event of their lives strikes me as unbelievable.

Huh? What's the preferred european medium? Smoke signal?

Very clever with your smoke signal comments!

Waiting for TV networks to call elections is not the same as having people watch TV in Europe. Getting angry at Fox News for calling Arizona is, for example, quite strange for me, because in my opinion, news networks shouldn't "call" the elections.

> Getting angry at Fox News for calling Arizona is, for example, quite strange for me, because in my opinion, news networks shouldn't "call" the elections.

I think you're misunderstanding what it means to "call" the election. Fox News calling Arizona for Biden didn't make Biden the winner of Arizona. It merely meant that Fox News was confident that Biden won the election in Arizona.

And yes, getting angry at Fox News for calling Arizona was strange.

They media makes election calls in Europe too. If you don't understand how election reporting works in either Europe or America maybe you shouldn't be trying to smugly lecture other people.

In case you don't believe me here is the BBC calling the general election for Boris before the votes were done counting:

https://www.bbc.com/news/election-2019-50765773

It's a mess. School kids really should learn the US constitution, but somehow that doesn't sink in and the pop culture does. People honestly didn't think Alexander Hamilton was an important figure until "Hamilton" came out.

Then they rely on media to tell them everything. Usually that's fine when it's straight factual news, but there's been a lot of spin in the news recently.

The electoral college is definitely well covered in every grade school social studies curriculum in the US.

Although, the median American learned those facts ~25 years ago at a time in their lives when they were too young to vote and politics was probably not an important part of their lives.

By comparison, movies are a lot more accessible, recent, and engaging.

That's not my lived experience here in New England. We were taught from history books in school. My friends still read now. We turn to researched-based election projections that are not directly tied to network news as we wait until the States certify their vote counts in due time.

from what I can tell is many schools stopped teaching what we used to call 'civics' classes. in that class you would learn things like this. so that people have a poor understanding is because they are reading the cliff notes of the cliff notes.

Because in practically all previous elections (except for maybe 2000), the declaration of the media was the end of the process. We never had every vote counted by that point, but we did know who won based on the counts that had come in and math. This year the count was just slower due to so much mail-in balloting, which everyone was warned about. The "official" election was simply a rubber stamp.

This whole thing with lawsuits is just Trump throwing a tantrum that he lost.

it's largely because many US schools focus almost entirely on historical events, rather than functional interpretation and study of the constitution and legal system from the perspective of current modern society.

Both are necessary, our education system heavily leans to the historical side.

Yes, maybe if we keep trying very hard, someday we will also have books in America. (?)

The arrogance of this comment is simply breathtaking.

As a British subject, it's not surprising though. We are taught a lot of things about Americans which turn out not to be true, that you learn history via movies is one of these things that gets said now and again.

I was chatting to someone the other day and asked if she'd been to America. No, she said, I can't stand Americans.

Do you know any Americans, I asked. Of course she didn't but she has been to Canada and asked if I had.

No, said I, I can't stand Canadians. She looked at me as if that was a ridiculous statement before realising I was being sarcastic. Go figure?

I live in the us and my experience is not only with 1 american but a majority of the americans I encountered (even ones educated at MIT or even in geopolitics at Georgetown), I feel that if we need to learn from movies we should all rewatch videodrome and think about the consequences of having partisan media.

Also I was not implying that you do not have books in america... But you can just see in this comment section (where most of the people are educated) that most of the replies hints that they do not understand the election process hence backing my statement.

The movies are obviously PC-Washing all history just like you removed your statues you are removing from your intellect everything that is not consensually approved and history has a lot that this new horde of censors of the good will not like. and the proof is that most the people reading this will downvote me using those censoring tools to destroy an opinion that they do not approve.

What is breathtaking is to read comments like "wasnt the election done?" purely because you want to win and hate the system when it doesn't play in your favor.

I mean, if your argument is that we have uninformed people in America, I certainly won't disagree.

That's different from the argument that "Americans don't understand civics because they watch movies instead of reading history books" which is frankly absurd and offensive.

I'm not convinced that the number of civically-uninformed people is particularly higher in America when compared to elsewhere in the world. If you have data to that effect, please share it.

For all intents and purposes the election is done. The votes have been cast and with most of them counted, Biden has won by a wide enough margin that sporadic concerns about voter fraud is not going to change it.

Americans who are pushing back against Trump's reticence to concede are not doing so not because they believe that TV decides who is elected, but because it's a bald-faced attempt at a coup. Trump has every right to challenge the results in court, but if there was actual evidence of widespread election irregularities, it would have been presented by now.

"I'm not convinced that the number of civically-uninformed people is particularly higher in America " I am convinced it is the case and it is because you guys totally eliminated debate from the public landscape and even more the media landscape.

I was watching US election at the same time on a french channel vs an US channel. I was pretty sure the level of understanding and debate would be higher on the US channel (and I checked a few of them) but was astonished to see that actually there wasn't any real concrete and intelligent political analysis (ok just one on numbers using stats) or even one ounce of debate while on the french channel the debate invited experts, was intelligent, one side was conceiding things to trump and the others one fighting it using arguments rather than emotions.

It is just mindblowing as an outsider to see that you totally removed debate from the equation and that any kind of debate/analysis is perceived as criticism or even worse racism/[add any bad word there] if it concedes things to trump.

Let me get this straight: you're saying that Americans are too reliant on television for information, and to support your analysis you're watching cable news?

We can both agree that there should be more healthy debate, both in general and in the media. So far though your argument has been that Americans are less civically-minded, and your supporting evidence has been a few people you talked to who mentioned movies and watching American infotainment television.

This isn't a particularly useful or interesting conversation for me at this point, so I'm going to go back to work. Thanks!

It is indeed highly disturbing, especially when the reaction to pointing this out is so hostile. It is borderline Orwellian.

Who has been hostile to the poster?

We don't teach our kids anything about how our government is structured, or why its put together that way, anymore. "Civics" is too boring and besides, diffuse, nameless feudalism is really what we want now anyway, so ignorant peasants will be in demand.

I am not an expert on the curricula of all 50 states, but I am not aware of any that do not include civics. Either as a separate course, or as a part of their social studies curriculum.

This is absurd nonsense. Did you actually attend school in America?

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