On: Ask HN: How do news networks get election data?

[knowtheory]

The AP's feed isn't free (please remember to pay journalists). News orgs like the NYT, NPR and others pay the AP a decent amount of money to manually go out and collect the results.

The AP has writeups of their process too:

http://www.ap.org/products-services/elections/FAQs

http://www.ap.org/products-services/elections/calling-races