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Notes -
Also, from what I remember, Chicago/Cook County was notorious for reporting results only after the rest of the state had come in.
There was a wacky sort-of-inverted example several years back--a statewide election in Wisconsin. Very close technically-nonpartisan (but not really) race, and as the last few votes were coming in from--predictably--Madison and Milwaukee, the Democrat-supported candidate narrowly pulled ahead. Then a stack of votes suddenly dropped in, mostly for the Republican-supported candidate, flipping the result. Everyone goes bananas.
It was quickly and easily proven that the last stack of votes was legitimate and the late reporting was genuinely an accident. What had happened was that a large chunk of a reliably-Republican county had reported in its vote totals to the central authority, and were marked off as having done so, but the recorder forgot to enter the count into the correct cells in the spreadsheet. That section reported zero votes for both candidates. There were no "found ballots," just a data entry error.
Several people who had been carefully following the results noticed the discrepancy, and made phone calls telling the officials about the issue, but there was enough of a delay confirming and correcting the error that various TV pundits had already been talking about how the D-supported candidate "appeared to have pulled out a narrow victory." They were unhappy when they had to walk that back on air.
The question, then, is whether if those Republican votes had been entered properly on time, would the Republican still have won?
Indeed. Since the race in question was the tie-breaking vote on the state Supreme Court, there was rather a lot riding on the result.
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