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Accurate, reliable results play a role in free and fair elections. So does explaining the data and helping people understand when and how it will be reported.
Nov. 4, 2025Updated 2:20 p.m. ET
Patrick Healy: Happy Election Day, folks. On Tuesday evening The Times will publish what we call our “results pages” for today’s elections — charts, maps and analysis showing up-to-the-minute data on voting in New York City, Virginia, New Jersey, California and other states with big races.
Both Republicans and Democrats hang on those results: When I was reporting on election night in 2016, and called Donald Trump on his cell around 9 p.m., the first thing he mentioned was The Times’s latest results in Michigan and Pennsylvania. In 2017, Roy Moore, the Republican Senate candidate in Alabama, showed The Times’ up-to-the-minute results charts at his election night party. Joe Biden’s campaign aides kept asking us in 2020 about results in the Arizona and Nevada nail-biters.
So when readers ask if The Times plays a role in free and fair elections in America, one of the things I point to is our work as a reliable source of accurate results.
Much of those efforts are led by Wilson Andrews, who oversees The Times’s presentation of live election results, and Will Davis, who leads the Election Analytics department that is responsible for our election night statistical model, which is often visualized as The Needle. I asked Wilson and Will about some of the work that goes into election night results at The Times.
Will, how does the election analytics team prepare for the vote count to make sure you guys go into it well informed?
