Simon Willison’s Weblog

How do media outlets get the presidential election results that they report?

6th November 2012

My answer to How do media outlets get the presidential election results that they report? on Quora

When I was working for the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas back in 2004 the results were compiled at city hall and made available to reporters / other concerned parties via FTP in a terrifying CSV format. I don’t know if the technology has evolved much since then, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was much the same today.