How votes get counted and reported on election night — and how NBC News gathers and checks the data
A network of reporters and voting experts gather results from thousands of jurisdictions, checking all of it for anomalies before viewers and readers see the data.
The task of counting and announcing vote results from over 100,000 precincts across the country — mostly within a few hours — requires a massive operation that involves hundreds of thousands of poll workers, election officials and observers.
We may think of a presidential election as a single nationwide contest, but how elections are administered varies across the 50 states and Washington, D.C. Even within states, different jurisdictions — counties, cities and so on — could have different administrative practices or logistics in the election process.
In most of the country, counties run elections. In a handful of states, particularly in New England, cities or towns administer them.
Nearly all of those jurisdictions provide multiple vote reports (updates to the vote count) on election night and in the following days. In the November 2020 election, NBC News received over 88,000 updates to its vote totals across 542 different races. More than 45,000 of those vote updates came before 2 a.m. ET on election night.
From 9:15 to 9:30 p.m. ET that night, NBC News received just over four updates per second, on average.
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