AP and Reuters pay people to check the results locally. Between them, they feed a LOT of outlets. A significant amount of the data is available online pretty quickly, but some states and localities simply don't publish the data in a timely manner.<p>Some news organizations will have their own staff checking results, especially in areas where it is known that the results will be slow and the results are going to be within polling error margins.<p>You'd think the data could be crowd-sourced more effectively, but private citizens get the data more slowly for a few reasons ... First is that there is red tape involved in obtaining the data (i.e. forms to fill out, fees to pay and it all must be done ahead of time) and second is that after-hours early access to data is just plain limited logistically. If it could be efficiently delivered to a large quantity of people, it would be presented online.<p>There are a few areas where the government decides that it's more efficient to let private parties distribute data, and it's generally pretty good business to become one of those parties. NMVTIS data comes to mind immediately (carfax and it's competitors), but there are many similar instances.
Associated Press offers a data feed <a href="http://ap.org/products-services/elections/FAQs" rel="nofollow">http://ap.org/products-services/elections/FAQs</a> <a href="https://developer.ap.org/ap-elections-api" rel="nofollow">https://developer.ap.org/ap-elections-api</a><p>"Shortly before the polls close, over 4,000 stringers report to county election centers. When the first polls close, they’ll be ready to start phoning in the raw vote as it is reported by the counties. They’ll place their calls to AP election centers around the country.<p>At the centers, a total of over 800 vote entry clerks will answer those calls, and walk each stringer through a dialogue as they enter the number of precincts reporting and the candidates’ votes into our election night system. "
I did this in the 2014 election cycle, reporting a county in Ohio.<p>They pay $50 for someone to go to the county and report the election results. There's an iphone, android, and mobile web site, as well as a call center that takes that input.<p>Honestly, it was a really fun evening in the middle of nowhere Ohio...
In Philadelphia, the city government publishes election results to phillyelectionresults.com as they're counted. The local civic hacking group (code for philly) built a nodejs scraper of the site (and an API for it) and a mobile-friendly front-end that auto-refreshes. It was available at whowonphilly.com, but the city government office that oversees elections has since adopted it as the official live results site.<p><a href="https://codeforphilly.org/blog/vote_and_watch_whowonphilly" rel="nofollow">https://codeforphilly.org/blog/vote_and_watch_whowonphilly</a><p>Disclaimer: I work in philly's city government. It's really cool, and we'll soon be hiring a product manager (for beta.phila.gov), a data engineer (for open data), and a front-end/wordpress developer.
The NYT had their code on GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/newsdev/elex-loader" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/newsdev/elex-loader</a>
Does anyone know if this data eventually becomes a dataset somewhere uploaded possibly free? It seems like AP's stream is for live data. I'd like the full break down by demographics and counties and stuff but clearly it's too late for it to be live.
They do -- in the form of staff on the ground collecting the information from the individual county-level offices. They collect that data as it's announced before it's even reported up to state election bodies.
The other one is Reuters. AP and Reuters are the two largest networks for gathering news. Most other brands that you know and recognize are in the business of distributing news.
I'm curious about this myself but more so on the voter registration side. For example, how do they make sure each voter is casting a single vote?<p>In Illinois I registered to vote well before the deadline. I showed up to cast my ballot but my name wasn't in the "database." The folks managing the polling station had to manually re-enter all my details into an Android tablet. While this was happening, I took out my phone and scanned the WiFi network of the church I was in. I assume the tablets were connected via wifi. I saw no other connection to the tablet besides a power connection. To my surprised the WIFI was running WEP. Hmm, this day in age you would think WEP would be default=off. This was at a local Church too. So perhaps the tablets use cellular data plans?<p>They get all my PII data entered, I get my ballot, fill it out, and pass it through a machine. The machine is in the corner of the building in a large box so I can't tell if it's hardwired to some network or using the wifi.<p>Later that day (about an hour later after re-entering my details into the Android tablet) I went to the Illinois voter registration web site to look up my name and I can find my details.<p>Anyone have any information on the tablet software? Who writes it? How it's transmitted and stored? What about the electronic ballot counting machines? Are the phoning home some where?<p>The whole setup seems sketchy to me.<p>As an aside: I know a couple people who have homes in different states and claim they can cast multiple votes by driving/flying to the state where they have 2nd home to cast a 2nd ballot.
I have some experience of this in the UK at least. Here we have feeds from the likes of the press association as well as the official results coming from the electoral commission. However, networks may have their own people at some or all of the counts. These would be local journalists who are attending the counts and will feed news stories back to the studio during the night. They will also get the results from the returning officer and call them in.<p>In the UK at least we aren't meant to release the results until the returning officer reads them out so waiting for any of the above while showing a live feed of a result would mean we don't have the result to show on screen immediately. For this reason you would likely also have people in the studio watching the live feeds from counts and entering the numbers which would then be double checked against the official feed later. This can be tricky when the result is drowned out by cheering from a crowd of supporters! ie "Labout party, John Candidate 22 thousand... <WOOOOOO - YEAAAH> ...hundred and 1 votes"<p>The focus for news orgs is getting these results out accurately before their competitors, no one wants to be slow to announce the results.
Back in the day it was via the News Election Service, which was a joint venture of the major news networks and AP. These volunteers (I was one of them) would go down to the voting precinct and once the votes were counted, the election officials would announce the totals for each candidate. They would write down and then phone in these results to a central office. There was a computer automated system at the other end that would ingest the results.
Well, the US seems both more advanced and more ass-backwards compared to here in Turkey. Our way of getting data is very archaic, with people checking the results locally etc. (Internet might or might not be internally involved in that). But the trust in the elections are very low, and so the coverage of the elections has been a BIG issue since 2014 or so, many news networks have a few sources in parallel, and had the numbers for each reporting outlet and their biases on screen at the same time (different outlets converge in the end, but the intermediate numbers they report can be VERY divergent)<p>In addition to all those, there is Oy ve Otesi, a non-profit does the entire thing with only volunteer work. Their coverage is pretty minimal in rural areas, though.
The state of Virginia has a json feed. But several times I saw news results reporting more votes than the state's website did. So it's at least not just that, if that helps.
In MN the Secretary of State makes data files (mostly csv) available to media outlets.<p>We transfer and process them, for national races we we the AP Election API
I don't know why there isn't a live data feed. I wish when you went in to vote there was a big screen that shows the current vote count for each candidate. You should be able to stay and watch the screen until the polls close and know exactly how your town voted.
Btw, Twitter definitely has the potential to rival and I think, dominate, AP and Reuters if they design the business that way. Just need a reliable way to decide trust worthiness of the tweet/source, and a way to put context around a tweet or a bunch of tweets so the headline can be derived from the tweets.
They get the data they are told to regurgitate from the same centralized authority that produces all other mainstream news... though they are pretty good at making it seem like true journalistic endeavors actually produce the information theyre droning out to the masses of TV zombies.
My impression is that pollsters, people surveying voters during the election, report via the AP or directly to networks; seems basically like the traditional news wire.
I previously read an article about this, too bad it is in Chinese <a href="http://www.wenxuecity.com/news/2016/11/07/5747980.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.wenxuecity.com/news/2016/11/07/5747980.html</a><p>basically it says it is based on exit poll. and it is costly, so many media companies formed an entity called NationalElection Pool to do the report.<p>And they also hired a company called Edison Research to do the exit poll.
Btw, Twitter definitely has the potential to rival and I think, dominate, AP and Reuters if they design the business that way. Just need a reliable way to decide trust worthiness of the tweet/source, and a way to put context around a tweet or a bunch of tweets so the headline can be derived from the tweets.