If every ballot is counted, how are election results announced before everyone votes?

If every ballot is counted, how are election results announced before everyone votes?

Thea Brodkin (Voter Service Chair) gives expert video advice on: How do votes get counted after an election?; Are the counts accurate?; What are 'overvotes' and 'undervotes'? and more...

There's something that goes on in a lot of communities called snap tallies. The newspaper or TV station will ask the election official if they could collect the results at a couple precincts as examples of what's happening in the community and then report that as trends. That's called snap tallies. That happens a lot in major elections but that's not counting the real vote. You have to know that that's not whether that vote is counted. So we do have snap tallies in a lot of places, so they get trends. Now of course with the presidential election, they try to get the TV station not to announce the winner before the polls close because that will discourage people from coming out to vote. When you first turn on your television after the polls close, what you normally are seeing when they say “zero precincts reporting” but there's a number up there. That's your count of the absentee ballots that came in before Election Day. The actually count, they have the ballots ready to go, then they just feed them in the machine real fast. So the fist numbers you usually get are absentee ballots.