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this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2024
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Politics
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They should at least actually count the votes before calling the election. That's what democracy is.
I mean, the projected winner maps aren't the US government's decision, it's what whatever news your watching has modelled as settled with an acceptable margin of error based on current information. Realistically they could have called most of the states months ago with that same error, some organizations just veil it more
The votes will be counted before electors are appointed. The news networks are just calling it in advance whenever it's clear which way it will go. It's their job.
The news media creates reality as the people see it. People make decisions based on their perception of reality that inform their political decisions. Therefore the news media is part of democracy, and it must construct reality democratically. That means waiting until the votes are counted.
Not sure I understand. They don't call it until after the polls close. How could calling it after the polls close influence people's political decisions?
Because Donald Trump is clearly planning, should Harris win, to use the earlier results as evidence that the election was stolen and they need to start a civil war about it.
He'd do that regardless. Not that it apparently matters now.
He didn't need any substantial evidence last time. Just lies, repeated loudly and often with confidence and conviction.
Last time, his coup failed. Drag was worried what would happen if 90% of people believed he was going to win, and then he didn't.
No - at least, not anymore. According to Reagan, news organizations are for-profit enterprises that manufacture profit for the stakeholders, by any means necessary, and they can say whatever they want.
If you are from NZ you may have been confused with it being called "news".
Since this could read as snarky, I want to clarify: I am being 100% genuine. They used to be held to standards in order to be allowed to call themselves that. After that change though, while some organizations held on longer than others to some previous ideals, they were optional conventions at that point rather than mandatory.
A lot of people in the US didn't really understand what that change meant either.
Anyway, there is no "must" here: a law, or standard, or convention or whatever we want to call it, without a means of enforcement is merely a suggestion.
News orgs call states based on a combination of polls and vote counts. States that poll significantly in one direction or the other are typically called early in that direction because the outcome is not in doubt
Polls are not Votes. Polls are not subject to the same scrutiny as Votes. Even in regions that have a traditional bias towards one party of the other, there can still (theoretically) be significant statistical differences.
For instance, what if the Mormon women also decided to vote along gender lines; they may informally poll Republican in front of their peers, but may vote Democrat in the privacy of the voting booth.
What if a landslide number of people who have never voted before all vote against the status quo. If they had never voted before, they wouldn’t have been included in any polling.
Whether this is a realistic scenario or not is irrelevant to whether it can be called until at least half the possible votes have been counted in favour of one candidate or the other.
You can ask "what if?" all you want, but that doesn't make your imagined alternative real. The news media calls states when they're confident in the outcome. Show me somewhere they got it wrong
No, there's no need here. I'm sure they have some votes counted, but they have a model and if the votes match the model they can, with pretty good confidence, call it early. There wasn't a chance here really and when they see the votes start going the predicted direction they know nothing crazy happened to flip it.