The 2022 primary season begins Tuesday with the Texas election, and The New York Times will report the results live on its website and apps. Here’s how it all works.
Results, achievements
How does The Times get direct election results?
Our live scores are provided by The Associated Press. To get its results, AP combines data feeds from state and county websites with field reports from more than 4,000 correspondents who collect vote counts from county clerks and other local officials after the polls close. The Times has also occasionally published data from other results providers.
How often are results updated on election night?
When the access point receives reports from the states, it checks the voting results for possible inconsistencies or errors. It then sends updated data to The Times and other clients about every one to three minutes. Calls with winners are sent out immediately.
Times journalists and engineers have written software that automatically downloads and publishes results within seconds. Don’t worry about refreshing the page – the results will update automatically.
Why do I see different vote counts on different sites?
Not every news organization gets election results from the AP like The Times does. There are two other election results providers used by news organizations: Edison Research and Decision Desk HQ. State or local governments also often show their own results in elections.
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These sources may have different counts on election night, depending on the speed and scope of their coverage of a particular race. Results from all providers may not match until all votes have been counted.
How does The Times track the proportion of votes registered in specific elections?
For years, election result providers have used polling station percentage data to give readers an idea of how many votes remain to be counted. Not anymore. The proliferation of mail-in and early voting has rendered this measure virtually useless in many states, as absentee votes generally do not count at polling places. This has often left readers and analysts at a loss as to how many votes remain to be counted.
This year, The Times will publish its own estimates of the remaining votes.
Early tonight, these estimates will be based on our pre-election turnout expectations based on previous elections and early voting data. Once the AP reports that the county has largely completed the vote count, we will compare the vote returns against our pre-election expectations and gradually revise our expectations for possible turnout. We expect these estimates to be better than the old ‘site reporting’ metric, but these are still only estimates. Usually they do not reflect official information about the number of remaining votes.
What is a plot?
The polling station is the lowest level at which election results are reported. A parcel can be several city blocks or an entire county.
Winners
How does The Times name the winners?
In almost every race we rely on AP calls. It has a team of analysts, researchers and race organizers who are well versed in the states in which they announce winners.
In addition to the total number of votes, racers look at county-level votes, votes by ballot type, and where there are still ballots to count.
The AP describes its decision-making process as “aimed at determining the answer to a single question: can the underperforming candidates catch up with the leader?” And only when the answer is an undeniable “no” will AP announce the race.
In a very small number of high-profile contests, The Times independently examines and evaluates AP race challenges before making a prediction.
How can The Times announce a race before the votes are counted?
News organizations can predict a winner even without results if the race was not hard fought or the party or candidate has a history of consecutive wins in the district or state. In some cases, the AP also relies on election poll results to help make decisions.
Most major news media organizations, including The AP, are waiting for polls to close before announcing a winner.
Cards
Why does my state’s election map look like it’s dominated by a candidate even though that person is behind in total votes?
The main type of map used on The Times results pages are areas shaded in different colors. This is known as a cartogram. For primary races, constituencies are color-coded to represent the candidate who leads the vote count.
Cartograms are great for quickly understanding geographic patterns and identifying leaders in a particular constituency that you care about. But since the geographic area of a district may not be proportional to the number of voters living in it, they do not always determine the winner of the entire state well.
That’s one reason The Times’ main results pages also feature a different type of map: a map in which circles show the size of the winning candidate’s advantage in each constituency.
These maps sometimes make it difficult to see results in districts where there are too few votes or where voting is very close, but they are good at showing localities where a large number of voters could nominate a candidate for the overall lead.