After polls close Tuesday at 7 p.m. in Virginia, The Washington Post will have the latest results in what will be one of the first two regularly scheduled statewide elections in the country since President Biden’s inauguration — and analysis to help you make sense of the results in the commonwealth.
2021 Election: Complete coverage and analysis ArrowRight
For the 2020 general election, we at The Post made some changes in the way we displayed live election data because of the increase in mail-in ballots and in-person early voting. And many of the changes we made we’ve decided to keep this year.
Live election results and outcome models
The number of voters casting ballots early isn’t quite as high as it was last year, but it is substantially higher than in the governor’s election four years ago. That means the number of precincts reporting results to the state is no longer a useful way to estimate how much of the vote has been counted. Instead, The Post is using past election results and updating vote totals to model a likely outcome throughout the evening.
Since early votes and Election Day votes are counted at different times, the results at any given moment on election night are unlikely to reflect the true state of the election. The Post will not declare winners in contested races or add color to our maps until 35 percent of the expected vote has been counted. After polls close, absentee ballots, early in-person votes and Election Day votes are counted at different times. This can cause shifts in the lead through election night, because the partisan differences influencing when people vote have not gone away. Democrats tend to vote early, and Republicans tend to vote on Election Day.
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We will also continue to use our estimate of votes outstanding. When possible, The Post will run its own model for estimating both the total vote and the partisan composition of the vote. And in elections where we are not running our model, we will use an estimated vote total received from our live-results provider, the Associated Press. We will confine our display to “precincts reporting” for those races where we neither have our own model nor an estimate from AP.
An additional benefit to running our own model is that we’ll have an estimate of both the total number of votes and the partisan composition of the votes we estimate have not yet been counted. We compute a range of possible outcomes on the basis of this modeled vote and add it to the existing vote totals. This provides The Post’s best estimate of the current state of a race. In comparison with the raw results, this modeled estimate is more reflective of where the race could end up.
The Post’s model uses precincts that have already reported and compares the numbers to a baseline election. For the baseline, we use the most recent previous election — in this case the 2017 governor’s election and the 2019 House of Delegates election.
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Using demographic data about the voters in each precinct from the voter-data-file provider L2 Political, The Post’s model estimates how much difference between this election and the last election is attributable to the demographic features of a precinct. For example, our model tries to answer how much of the vote can be explained by the fact a given precinct might have a large number of voters over age 65.
Our model applies these calculations to all of the precincts that have not yet reported their results to give us an estimate for how much of a swing from the previous election we might expect to occur in other precincts. From this swing, we can calculate the total number of outstanding votes as well as the range of likely outcomes. And, of course, we update these live through the night.
A more technical description of how our model works is available on our engineering blog.