What to Know About Election Results and The New York Times Needle

Follow live updates on the 2024 presidential election and get the latest Harris-Trump results.

We have spent months preparing to report on thousands of federal, state and local races on Election Day, including by collecting results and other data on the vote count from precincts and counties across the country. This year, a team of nearly 100 Times journalists, engineers, statisticians, data experts and researchers are collaborating to deliver up-to-the-minute results, displayed live on nytimes.com with a full array of interactive maps and charts so that you can see what is happening in the most important races of the night.

That data also feeds into the Needle, our election night statistical model, which estimates the final outcome based on partial election results, helping readers understand what to make of the vote that has been counted so far.

Publishing the Needle live on election night relies on computer systems maintained by engineers across the company, including some who are currently on strike. How we display our election forecast will depend on those systems, as well as incoming data feeds, and we will only publish a live version of the Needle if we are confident those systems are stable.

If we are not able to stream the Needle’s results live, our journalists plan to run its statistical model periodically, examine its output and publish updates in our live blog about what they see — giving our readers a sense of where the race actually stands over the course of the night.

We introduced the Needle in 2016 and have been refining it ever since. Here is a look at how it works:

Why have the Needle?

The purpose of the Needle is to put election results in proper context as they come in. Early returns are often very misleading; the first votes counted often differ substantially from those that remain.