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Comment by tristanperry | Hacker News Reader

Looks like a solid No victory - a 21% gap between no and yes.

Live results available at http://ekloges.ypes.gr/current/e/public/index.html#{%22cls%2...} (click on GB flag on bottom left to change to English)

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Doesn't that depend on where the current results come from? If you watch the results of a US Presidential election on the county level, you can see much wider swings; the cities, which vote D, often turn in their results much later than the rural counties.

(Or maybe in this case, the results really are representative. I know nothing about Greek politics.)

The results are in real time and are representative. Each voting center sends its results via phone. The site has also an api http://ekloges.ypes.gr/current/more/customizer/paramsdoc.htm...

The map on the Guardian page that this HN submission points to suggests otherwise re: it being a representative sample. The districts appear to be relatively large, and most districts are reporting 0% counted while others are at e.g. 50%. The districts with any votes reported at all are also strongly clustered.

I think we're working from different definitions of "representative" The sense I mean it in is, "the election centers that have reported results are demographically representative, and therefore predictive, of countrywide results".

That might be the case, but you didn't provide any evidence to suggest it is, so the more likely explanation is that you thought I meant something else by the word.

The results are from all voting centers. Once a voting center finishes counting, it sends it to the data center. So the data are sent more or less randomly to the data center. You are right that this does not mean that are truly representative. But for the sake of simplicity we can call it "representative".

Gotcha. Thanks for the clarification!

I dunno either, really, but I've watched it go from 30% reporting to 40%, and the yes/no spread remained pretty much the same.

EDIT- Now 62%, still essentially unchanged. Remarkable consistency so far.

The UK is a pretty extreme example of that (the other way round; urban areas tend to report first), so May saw Labour-party members discussing the unexpected scale of their defeat even whilst the actually announced results and counted votes put them some way ahead. Of course, in this case the analysts had plenty of past data to work with in being confident that narrow successes in urban areas and defeats in marginal areas meant little hope of any gains anywhere else.

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