Today's Election Day. When Will We Know the Result?
Today, November 3, is election day in the US. For me, for many years, I'd go to the polls today. Even when mail-in voting has been available- and absentee ballots haven't always easy to get approval for- I've made a tradition of going to vote in person. This year it's different, though, because of Coronavirus. Hawk and I filled out our ballots at home and dropped them off at the local polling station on Sunday morning.
Voting on Sunday makes us part of one of the interesting statistics for the 2020 election: we're two of the (now) 98 million people who cast early ballots. That's way more people that have ever voted early before and is almost 71% of the total who voted in 2016 [source: Vox article, 2 Nov 2020]. It's estimated that total turnout could reach the level of 65% of registered voters - which would make it a record in modern history.
Polls, and Polls
As eyes turn toward the result of the election, it's important to understand what's being reported. It's confusing because a lot of it involves the word "poll"- which has multiple meanings!
In my opening above I wrote about how people "Go to the polls" on election day. This meaning of the term refers to casting a vote. A vote is a poll- a "poll" being anything that asks people a question. A polling place is the official location where ballots can be filled out and submitted.
"Poll" also has another definition, the one used every time people talk about opinion polls. These are surveys. They're unofficial questions such as "What do you think of...?", "How do you intend to vote on...?", or "Whom/What did you vote for?" conducted by political researchers and- quite prominently today- media organizations.
A lot of what the media report during the day on election day comes from exit polls. They survey people who voted and ask them whom/what they voted for. These surveys can be pretty accurate when conducted by professional, experienced organizations, but even so they're not the actual result. The actual result comes from states, counties, and localities counting the actual ballots.
It Seems Unlikely We'll Know Tonight
"Will we know the outcome tonight?" is a common question. In the past we generally have known the result in the evening on election day, through a combination of exit polling (i.e., surveys) and actual counting. Some of the actual counting can be completed on election day. In the fine print on news reports you'll see footnotes like, "73% of precincts reporting." Media organizations make an estimate based on the partial returns plus surveys to predict the final result.
In the past media predictions have been bold. In 1984 major networks notoriously predicted the reelection of Ronald Reagan at 6pm EST, a few hours before voting closed in eastern states and several hours before it closed in the west. Ultimately the news networks were right about Reagan's landslide victory- it was a landslide so it was easy predict, unlike the infamous "Dewey Defeats Truman!" headline miss in 1948. Even so, it left a bad taste in many people's mouths that the result of the election had been "called" before millions of voters even cast their ballots.
2020 is not a big year for bold predictions, though; at least not for most major media. The media were stung in 2016 when widespread predictions that Hillary Clinton would win were belied by Donald Trump's victory. Of course, the polls (opinion polls) weren't as wrong as some people thought they were.... Hillary Clinton did win millions more votes than Donald Trump; the distortion of the antiquated and deliberately unequal Electoral College gave Trump the victory. And even in the few states that Trump won unexpectedly, powering him to that Electoral College win, he won by razor thin margins over Clinton that were within the margin of error of opinion polls.
In addition to this "Once bitten, twice shy" phenomenon among news media it's further unlikely we'll have definitive results tonight because of the high percentage of voting by mail. In many states, in past years, mail-in ballots were such a small percentage of all votes cast that a) states left counting them until after election day, and b) the media felt comfortable projecting the outcome before they were counted. This year voting by mail is huge. Due to the pandemic, states have expanded access to it and millions more voters are choosing it.
Voting on Sunday makes us part of one of the interesting statistics for the 2020 election: we're two of the (now) 98 million people who cast early ballots. That's way more people that have ever voted early before and is almost 71% of the total who voted in 2016 [source: Vox article, 2 Nov 2020]. It's estimated that total turnout could reach the level of 65% of registered voters - which would make it a record in modern history.
Polls, and Polls
As eyes turn toward the result of the election, it's important to understand what's being reported. It's confusing because a lot of it involves the word "poll"- which has multiple meanings!
In my opening above I wrote about how people "Go to the polls" on election day. This meaning of the term refers to casting a vote. A vote is a poll- a "poll" being anything that asks people a question. A polling place is the official location where ballots can be filled out and submitted.
"Poll" also has another definition, the one used every time people talk about opinion polls. These are surveys. They're unofficial questions such as "What do you think of...?", "How do you intend to vote on...?", or "Whom/What did you vote for?" conducted by political researchers and- quite prominently today- media organizations.
A lot of what the media report during the day on election day comes from exit polls. They survey people who voted and ask them whom/what they voted for. These surveys can be pretty accurate when conducted by professional, experienced organizations, but even so they're not the actual result. The actual result comes from states, counties, and localities counting the actual ballots.
It Seems Unlikely We'll Know Tonight
"Will we know the outcome tonight?" is a common question. In the past we generally have known the result in the evening on election day, through a combination of exit polling (i.e., surveys) and actual counting. Some of the actual counting can be completed on election day. In the fine print on news reports you'll see footnotes like, "73% of precincts reporting." Media organizations make an estimate based on the partial returns plus surveys to predict the final result.
In the past media predictions have been bold. In 1984 major networks notoriously predicted the reelection of Ronald Reagan at 6pm EST, a few hours before voting closed in eastern states and several hours before it closed in the west. Ultimately the news networks were right about Reagan's landslide victory- it was a landslide so it was easy predict, unlike the infamous "Dewey Defeats Truman!" headline miss in 1948. Even so, it left a bad taste in many people's mouths that the result of the election had been "called" before millions of voters even cast their ballots.
2020 is not a big year for bold predictions, though; at least not for most major media. The media were stung in 2016 when widespread predictions that Hillary Clinton would win were belied by Donald Trump's victory. Of course, the polls (opinion polls) weren't as wrong as some people thought they were.... Hillary Clinton did win millions more votes than Donald Trump; the distortion of the antiquated and deliberately unequal Electoral College gave Trump the victory. And even in the few states that Trump won unexpectedly, powering him to that Electoral College win, he won by razor thin margins over Clinton that were within the margin of error of opinion polls.
In addition to this "Once bitten, twice shy" phenomenon among news media it's further unlikely we'll have definitive results tonight because of the high percentage of voting by mail. In many states, in past years, mail-in ballots were such a small percentage of all votes cast that a) states left counting them until after election day, and b) the media felt comfortable projecting the outcome before they were counted. This year voting by mail is huge. Due to the pandemic, states have expanded access to it and millions more voters are choosing it.