That timeline glitch on the 2022 election night feed still bugs me

I was watching the live results on a major news site at 9:47 PM Eastern on November 8th 2022 and the vote count jumped by 22,000 in one refresh for a county that only has 15,000 registered voters. Nobody in the comments seemed to notice because they were too busy arguing about other stuff. I pulled the page source and the timestamp on that data packet was out of order by 14 minutes. It could be a server lag issue or something stupid but it keeps nagging at me. Has anyone else looked at the raw data feeds from that night and seen weird gaps?

2 comments

2 Comments

ray18917h ago

Funny you mention that because I've been noticing similar weird glitches with food delivery app estimated times lately. The app will say my driver is 5 minutes away then suddenly jump to 15 minutes with no explanation, like the data is being pulled from two different clocks. It's the same kind of out-of-sequence thing you're describing - numbers that don't add up unless something got mislabeled in the backend. Makes me wonder how much of the "real time" stuff we see is actually just a pretty screen covering up sloppy data handling. You ever catch something like that in other apps or just politics?

terry_lewis2117h ago

Double down on that thought. @ray189, it's like the whole system runs on hope rather than actual data.