Democratic primary results differ widely by source

Published results of the delegate counts for Democratic primaries differ significantly between the various news organizations. To date there have been 35 different Democratic primaries held and there are another 22 yet to happen. This is based on 50 states, DC, Democrats Abroad, Virgin Islands, Guam, Puerto Rico, American Samoa and the Northern Marianas Islands. It is surprising that the 6 major sources of election news, the Associated Press, CBS, CNN, NBC, FiveThirtyEight, and Wikipedia have widely different results to date for Clinton and Sanders. Although there are numerous other sources of results, the Associated Press provides the results used by ABC, Bloomberg, FOX, Huffington Post, New York Times, NPR, POLITICO, Time, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

It is particularly surprising how few of the 57 different primaries have the same results from all of the various sources.

The biggest difference for any specific primary is in the results for Pledged Delegates for the state of Washington. In fact the results for this one primary accounts for the majority of the difference in the total pledged delegate results.

In total, these differences can be quite substantial. In fact, the difference between the highest and lowest published results is 49 delegates for Clinton, 114 delegates for Sanders and 87 delegates in total.

When each of the news organizations talk about the difficulty for Sanders to have a path to the nomination, it is important that they start with results that are accurate. It makes a significant difference if there actually only a gap of 228 pledged delegates to overcome, rather than the 318 delegate gap shown by AP.