The election could have been called much earlier

(Source: St Stev, Flickr)

The talking heads on TV talk shows like MSNBC and Fox News are notorious for their innumeracy. But on election night last week, they impressed me by demonstrating numbersense.

Viewers have been warned not to expect a result on the day of the election, as all the reputable forecasters such as Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight, and the Economist, had proclaimed the 2024 edition to be the most tightly contested ever. Silver famously announced that he ran 80,000 simulations to discover that the 2024 presidential election would be a toss-up (50/50 with Kamala getting the edge by the tiniest of decimal points). Close races will require counting of all votes, including early and mail-in votes, and some states accept mailed votes that arrive after election day if they were postmarked prior. It sounded like we were predestined for another cliffhanger, like in 2020.

Various channels stayed with that narrative faithfully throughout the broadcasts, as the hosts (including some data scientists) dove into selective counties to report how Trump was performing against his 2016 or 2020 margins, and whether Kamala was over- or under-performing Biden's 2020 numbers.

Meanwhile, a red wave was rolling over the whole map, as we eventually learned. The early taking of Florida was a harbinger. Then, Trump started leading in all seven so-called "swing" states. Even now, the talking heads told viewers the election was "too close to call". It was not until the next morning that most of these networks eventually confirmed Trump the victor.

Nevertheless, some time before midnight, the tone of the election broadcasts changed. The hosts ceased pretending that Kamala had any chance left, even as they perfunctorily stated that their networks had yet to call the overall winner.

Those were the telling moments at which the talking heads gave in to their numbersense. Their data science colleagues were telling them to shush for the sake of good "science"; the business leaders didn't want them to ruin the watch parties. And yet, the numbersense in their heads insisted the race was over.

The hosts tip-toed into post-mortem analyses, but checked themselves, acting like unruly drivers who cut over multiple lanes to make a turn, all the time apologizing to other drivers while doing the naughty. Later, they threw caution to the wind, and earnestly examined the bruised blue corpse of the election.

***

The mood turned on the concept of "too close to call". What does it mean?

In the U.S., the news outlets follow the presidential election as a collection of state elections because of the electoral college. The focus is on the "swing states", of which there are seven in 2024. These are the (only) states for which the outcomes are somewhat uncertain.

The media outlets have been endowed the responsibility of "calling" the election. For some reason, each state election is reported as a horse race, with vote counts continuously updated after the polls close. As a result, while people in the Western states are still voting, the results in some other states have already been publicized. Furthermore, early results don't necessarily forecast final results since the sequence of vote counting is far from random. The non-random order of counting affects close races even more.

All the swing states were tagged "too close to call" on election night. What calculations happen to draw this conclusion?

Let's take a look at the situation in North Carolina at 10:47 pm ET, as shown in this CNN screenshot:

Trump was leading Kamala 51% to 48%, a gap of 135,000 votes. The race was labeled "too close to call".

The key number is displayed at the bottom: the current result reflected 84% of the total votes. That means 16% of the votes were still to be counted. Since 4.8 million votes have been counted, they were expecting roughly 910,000 votes. (I'm assuming no third-party votes, which is roughly correct as the Kamala and Trump percentages added up to 98.6%.)

The gap of 135,000 is 15% of 910,000. Thus, in order for Harris to get even, she would have needed to grab 15%+48% = 63% of the remaining votes while Trump gets 51%-15% = 36%. If she were to overtake Trump, she would have needed to win over 63% of the remaining votes.

In the initial 84% of votes, she claimed 48% to Trump's 51%; in the last 16%, she had to win 63% to 36%. In my view, that was an impossible feat so the race could have been called at that point (or even earlier). While the last 16% of the votes could have been skewed Democratic, it's not likely because the vast majority had already been counted, and counting happened simultaneously across all counties.

The data scientists behind the scenes would have access to even more data, at the county-level. The remaining votes were going to be found in a subset of the counties. They can repeat the same analysis obtaining a county-level required vote split for Kamala to get even or overtake Trump. On election night, the hosts worked around the election maps and highlighted some of the counties that have higher populations, especially Democratic strongholds where Kamala could have found additional votes. It didn't convince me that Kamala could cover the gap.

***

Now, the networks would defend their non-call by a criterion of "mathematical impossibility". That essentially means that they wouldn't call the race unless and until Trump's vote tally exceeded half the total votes, making it "mathematically impossible" for Kamala to win, regardless of uncounted votes.

This defense rings hollow because the same networks were extremely quick to call states like California and Wyoming - typically within a minute of the polls closing. At the time they called those "easy" states, they clearly did not see Trump's tally exceed half. So they were using different criteria for different states.

The whole business of having media outlets "call" the election results boggles the mind. These outlets have an incentive to hold out as long as possible because of viewership and ratings.

 

Comments

[Mickey Droy]

I think you are talking about an election of votes cast by humans.

The hidden subject of all election broadcasts was whether there would be a repeat steal (or at least an apparent repeat steal).

Just because most media were not able to discuss this publicly does not mean it was not on their mind.

It appears there wasn't - we will find out why in due course. But a handful of big city "counties" like Maricopa where 2m out of 3m Arizona voters voted in 2020 and which took a long time to count makes both genuine and dishonest surprises always quite feasible in US.
They have an excellent voting system to make sure some states do not dominate other states (which the system was designed for). They have a dreadful system for parties to compete in.

[David]

Would it be better, rather than showing the percentage as a ratio of "Votes for / current count" as "Votes For / Total votes" so that there wouldn't be 50% or close to it in highly contested races until nearly all votes were counted, and mathematical impossibility would be front and center?

Like if you knew there were 1000000 people that voted, and the current count was 304928 for a candidate (with 500000 current count), you'd only show 30.5 percent as opposed to a truly misleading 61%?

[Kaiser]

David: Interesting idea.

In terms of improvements, I think they should show the outcome of the calculations that I did in the post. For each contest, they could compute the required vote share for the currently losing candidate to overtake the current winner. If they show this analysis for the counties with the largest remaining votes, that should be enough to gauge the chance of a reversal.

[DV]

Kaiser:
Further, they can show both the required percentage of remaining votes needed to win AND the expected number of votes based on the sum of (current margin by county x votes remaining in that county).

Those two numbers in combination will give a better picture of how much the remaining sample would have to over/under-perform the counted sample to change the winner.