When you are in the business of reporting election results, nothing is quite so unbearable as a blowout election. We prefer the nailbiters, when it’s close enough that you don’t call it immediately when the polls close but not so close that it’s impossible to call at all. The general elections of 2013 were terrible in that regard, with massive margins for the victors in the NYC mayor and New Jersey governor races. Luckily for results jockeys like me, Virginia’s gubernatorial race turned out to be closer than expected. Democrat Terry McAuliffe had held a consistent but weakening lead in the polls leading up to the election, but for most of the night his Republican opponent, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, was ahead in the tally only to see it slip away in the end.

This was a bit surprising to some of our readers. Early in the night when there were only 10% of precincts reporting, it seemed liked Cuccinelli held an impressively solid lead. The confusion stemmed from how we report results. Almost every news organization uses a simple metric to calculate “percent reporting”: divide the number of precincts reporting by the total precincts in the state. The problem with calculating the percent of precincts reporting is that it is not a good measure of the percent of the population reporting. If all precincts were equally sized and distributed across a state, it would serve as a decent approximation, but the number of voters in a precinct can vary dramatically from location to location. Scott County in Virginia’s rural west recorded 5127 votes across 18 precincts for an average of 285 voters per precinct. Densely urban Arlington in eastern Virginia recorded 67,190 votes across 53 precincts for an average of 1,268 voters per precinct. Rural precincts report earlier not just because they have fewer votes to record; rural precincts also usually close on time, while crowded precincts will stay open past poll closing time to accommodate anybody who was waiting in line at that point.

Most state elections follow this pattern. Rural precincts that generally favor Republicans will report earlier in the night, while more populated counties that may favor Democrats will trickle in later in the night. It can be confusing to readers to thus see a candidate who was losing in the polls start with an early lead in the polls. This confusion is only made worse by the sports metaphors we often use in our coverage. Once we start reporting the results, a given candidate doesn’t “come out of the gate strong” like a horse or “come back from behind” in a vote deficit to win like a football team; the polls are closed and there is no legal way for a campaign to influence the final outcomes. The dramatic narratives we think we see in tabulation are often just an artificial result of how votes are counted, although there are compelling stories in how campaigns move the polls and bring out the votes to get to that final result.

These delays in tabulation are why early numbers often paint a deceptive picture. This is why calling desks value exit polls so highly. They are by no means perfect, but they attempt to provide a better picture of the whole state’s voting preferences when the early results are still heavily skewed rural. I also have found a crude projection can help when results are being reported from almost every county:

• For each county reporting, scale up projected vote counts for each candidate by dividing their tallies by the percent of precincts reporting in that county.
• Create a statewide projected vote total for each candidate by summing up their county projections.
• Compute new vote percentages for each candidate based on their totals here.

This approach is relatively crude compared to more sophisticated projections that might include likely voters or exit poll data, but it’s also easy to compute. We’ve already seen that the number of voters in a precinct might vary dramatically from county to county, but it’s safer to assume there’s less deviation within a county. So, this projection uses the votes recorded in precincts reporting to scale up projected votes in heavily-populated areas even when only a few precincts have reported. No projection is perfect, but this one showed McAuliffe taking the lead a full half hour before that became apparent in the statewide vote counts.

SELECT 
  r.load_id AS load_id, 
  r.changed_at AS changed_at, 
  r.total_votes AS total_votes,
  r.precincts_reporting_pct AS report_pct,
  dem.vote_count AS dem_votes,
  rep.vote_count AS rep_votes  
FROM race_diffs r
LEFT OUTER JOIN result_diffs dem ON dem.race_kind = r.race_kind AND dem.race_id = r.race_id AND dem.load_id = r.load_id AND dem.party_id = 'Dem'
LEFT OUTER JOIN result_diffs rep ON rep.race_kind = r.race_kind AND rep.race_id = r.race_id AND rep.load_id = r.load_id AND rep.party_id = 'GOP'
WHERE 
  r.nyt_race_id = '#{nyt_race_id}' AND
  r.race_kind = 'state'

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