2016 Election Night

An update about what’s going on in Nevada right now, since it’s pretty convoluted, open to a certain amount of interpretation, and a lot of you seem to have questions about it. This afternoon, a judge denied the Trump campaign’s request that early-vote ballots be sequestered and that information on poll workers be given out, though the suit might well continue, according to elections experts I’ve talked to. From a macro view, the purpose of the Trump suit seems to be to lodge a complaint on the record about potential improprieties in heavily Latino Clark County in case the race is close in Nevada. To be clear, the facts on the ground do not, at this point in time, seem to suggest that there were any improprieties (see Jon Ralston’s reporting from the state if you’d like to know more.) One question this suit would have to grapple with if it ever reaches a point of action is: When did voters got in line to vote during early-voting hours? On Election Day itself, Nevada law is clear that you cannot vote if you’ve entered the line past the official closing time of a polling place. But the rules are foggier when it comes to early-voting days. If they got in after the time when polling places officially closed, that could indeed be problematic … or it might not matter. It depends on what legal expert you’re talking to. Over at Slate, Rick Hasen argues that since early voting locations are often at sites used for other purposes — like the Nevada grocery store polling site that’s in question in the Trump suit — the rules are more flexible, citing Nevada code: “The schedules for conducting voting are not required to be uniform among the temporary branch polling places.” This is basically the argument that Clark County lawyers made this afternoon. In an email, Professor Ned Foley, an elections expert at Ohio State University Law School, said he saw the validity of this argument, that voters should be allowed flexibility on early voting days, but offered the other side as well: “I also see the counterargument, that once a scheduled closing hour is set for each day of early voting, the government must stick with that closing hour, meaning that a voter who shows up late needs to come back the next day, or on Election Day itself if that’s the next day of voting. Some points in support of this counterargument are: rules are rules and needed to be followed, especially in elections, so that all political parties and voters know the rules in advance; thus once set, shouldn’t be changed. Also, letting late voters cast a ballot isn’t fair to voters who didn’t try to go after the scheduled closing hour; they didn’t know that the rule would be bent for some. Of course, for any voter who was already in line at the closing hour, there’s no dispute: they get to cast a ballot.” The law, jealous mistress that she is, offers no clear answers.

Jonathan Bernstein posted an underreported statistic about the election the other day (citing Boris Shor): 73 percent of Democratic state legislators are endorsing Clinton, while 5 percent of Republican state legislators are endorsing Trump. This strikes me as incredibly important. Yes, a number of prominent Republicans have refused to back Trump and have even urged a vote for Clinton, and a few others like John McCain have gone back and forth in their support. But only in the state legislative endorsements do you get a sense of the dramatic differences between the major-party candidacies this year. Like most other information about state legislators, this hasn’t been well-covered. Yet it might have given Republican voters greater confidence in casting a vote for someone else or even skipping the presidential race altogether if they knew how many of their party’s elites were opposed to its presidential nominee.

Throughout this evening, we’ll be updating election night forecasts as states are called for presidential and senate candidates. To clear up any misinterpretations, we’re not trying to project states based on partial returns. So if (for example) Trump is leading Missouri by 5 percentage points with 40 percent of precincts reporting, that won’t matter to the model. Instead, our election night model is much simpler than that. It relies upon only these three things:

1. Our pre-election forecasts.
2. States that are “called” by our partners at ABC News.
3. The amount of time that has passed since the polls closed in a state, if it hasn’t been called yet.

To repeat, these forecasts do not use votes counted so far. They also do not use exit polls. They do not look at margin of victory. The only input is a single designation for every state: “D” (called for the Democrat), “R” (called for the Republican”) or blank (not called yet), based on calls made by the ABC News Decision Desk. We can also call states for independent candidates or project that the Georgia or Louisiana Senate races will go to a runoff. Having a state called for you helps in two ways in the model.

• It gives you electoral votes.
• It helps you in our forecast for the other states. For example, if Wisconsin has been called for Clinton, the model can infer that she’s more likely to win Minnesota. And it really helps candidates if they win in an upset, since that’s a sign that they may be beating their polls everywhere.

Our election models have been running tens of thousands of simulations each day in order to account for the relationship between different states in the Electoral College. The most important takeaway is that state outcomes are correlated: If Trump (unexpectedly) wins Virginia, for example, he’s also extremely likely to win North Carolina. So each simulation creates a plausible map based on a state’s region and demographics. In one simulation, perhaps, Clinton might outperform among Hispanics, therefore winning Florida and Arizona despite losing Ohio and Iowa. These simulations are useful for our election night forecast also. Once we know the results in some states, we can make better inferences about the results in the remaining ones. So as states are called, we update the forecasts accordingly based on a series of regression analyses that relate every state to every other one. The model also considers how long it’s been without a call in a state. If it originally expected Clinton to win New Jersey by 10 percentage points, for instance, but New Jersey still hasn’t been called five hours after polls have closed there, it will discount that lead significantly, assuming the state is closer than pre-election polls had it. As a final word of caution, I wouldn’t read too much into the first few called states unless there are substantial upsets (Clinton winning Indiana, for example). But once swing states start to be called and the model has more data to work off, its projections will be more meaningful.