New York Times election needle briefly offline due to coding error
The New York Times “election needle” was offline for about an hour during Tuesday night’s midterms due to what a leading staffer says was a coding error.
As of 9:30 p.m., the issue appeared to have been fixed after the Times displayed an alert at the top of its election results page that read, “We’re looking into an issue with our estimates in Louisiana. We plan to turn the needle back on soon.”
Several users on Twitter pointed out errors in the needle’s calculations as results came in as polls closed on Tuesday night.
“We’re going to have to pull the needle off the page to fix this,” said Nate Cohn, the newspaper’s chief political analyst, in response to one. “Louisiana appears to have been coded as Democratic at some point, adding an extra seat for them. All other estimates would be unaffected.”
The election needle has become a staple of the Times’s political coverage since it was first implemented in 2016, when it drew sharp criticism for giving Hillary Clinton an 80 percent chance of victory over Donald Trump.
“It projects the final result based on an analysis of the vote that’s been counted and an estimate of how many votes are still left to be counted,” the newspaper wrote in a recent explanation of how the forecasting tool works.
“The needle compares the election results to our pre-election expectations for each county or precinct. It estimates how the remaining votes will break, based on the patterns in the results counted so far,” the Times wrote.
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