Quote (Kayeto @ Nov 4 2020 04:05am)
Sorry, but that's not how projections work
If you roll a ball down a hill, you can project (with a reasonable degree of certainty) that the ball is going to reach the bottom of the hill. This is especially true when you have rolled the same ball down the same hill many times before.
For the sake of projections, you don't need to worry about the possibilities that something unforeseeable happens, like a huge gust of wind comes in and pushes the ball up ... or that a bolt of lightning suddenly strikes the ball and fries it to a crisp.
Once a likelihood of winning is 99.5% or greater (which is the case in Cali as soon as the polls close) a media outlet can declare their projection. Projections have been wrong before and they will eventually be wrong again. Projections don't win the race. But they are within the scope of how the media covers elections.
Perhaps you should read the AP guidelines for declaring a state. Because according to their own guidelines, they only call a state, winner, or measure when it's locked in, aka no chance it's an incorrect forecast.
Yet again, they had called Hawaii with 0% reporting, while polls were still open. You're attempting to point at the projections of individual media companies. I'm looking at the numbers supplied by the Associated Press, who touts themselves as the "no-narrative" source for live updates to election counts.
AKA, they wouldn't "project" that the ball reaches the bottom of the hill. Maybe somebody grabs it, maybe it gets run over, maybe a meteor hits it. They don't know until they have the facts of the matter. Part of the reason many of the media companies use the AP election counts as a source is specifically because they can tout the factual nature of the counts while simultaneously making their own wild projections that may or may not be accurate.
This post was edited by InsaneBobb on Nov 4 2020 06:19am