The famous election prognosticator, New York Times's "Needle", was projecting an 84 per cent chance of a Donald Trump victory with about 295 electoral college votes based on its data at 10:30 p.m. Tuesday (9 a.m. Wednesday in India).
The "Needle" swings as the data that comes in is analyzed in real-time and makes the projection it considers valid at that time.
A little before 10 p.m. it showed Trump at near 290 seats before swinging back down five to 285 at 10 p.m. and rising 30 minutes later to 295.
The "Needle" makes longer-range projections than those made by The Associated Press and networks like NBC and Fox News by combining the coming polling trends with demographic and historical data.
At 10 p.m., the electoral college votes reported by the media were 198 for Trump and 112 for Harris.
The New York Times computer systems weren't working too well at that time due to the union of the technology workers of the newspaper striking over issues related to pay and conditions.
The newspaper acknowledged the problem and wrote, "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", it said.
Apparently, it is confident of the system's ability to handle the projections.
On the eve of the election, the newspaper's poll had given Harris a 3 per cent lead over Trump.
The RealClear Polling's aggregation had Trump with a 0.6 per cent lead, which is a virtual tie.
Read also| New UK Opposition Leader Appoints Priti Patel as Shadow Foreign Secretary
