How does CBC make projections for who wins on election night?

Hi, I’m Meg, I’m with the CBC News Decision Desk. Our team will be monitoring the results as they come in.

Tonight, you might read something along the lines of, “The CBC News Decision Desk is ready to make a projection.” That means our team of experienced journalists have seen enough votes counted to confidently project an outcome before the results are final.

CBC doesn’t “elect” a winner or “declare” a winner because it’s New Brunswickers who choose, not us.

The Decision Desk’s process works best in provincial and federal elections — we have more data points to look at when multiple ridings are reporting under a party system, we have voting histories, we have fairly reliable campaign polls, we have good intel from stakeholders — all that and more can either increase or decrease our surety in making a projection once we see results being counted.

In municipal elections, especially in jurisdictions where there are no parties, it’s a little different. Individual races can be harder to project. But we’re still here (just try to keep us away from an election night!) and if we get to a point where the candidate in second place can’t overcome the candidate in first place with the vote that is left to report, we can make a projection.

This is not a race, since there’s no point in being first when you’re wrong. We take the time needed to get it right. When a race is too close to call, our team waits for final results.

But… one more thing. Because Elections N.B. uses tabulators to count the votes, we expect the numbers to fly in pretty quickly, as they did in the provincial election in 2024. So counts could be final or close to final very quickly, which means we might not even get to a projection at all before all the counting is done!