[majewsky]

All this "calling races" bullshit is only because the ballot counting process is so utterly fucked up in the US. I live in Germany. When there is an election for federal or state parliament, polls close at 6 PM and results appear around 8-10 PM on the websites of the state election offices. Somewhere around midnight, the "preliminary official result" is released. (The official result follows about a week later, after the routine recounts are done, but they never differ by more than a few votes.)

We do also have predictions on TV as soon as the polls close at 6PM, and they are always off by a few percentage points, but they rapidly converge, especially because the official results come so fast. By 8 PM there is not much chance for surprises (maybe one or two parliament seats get reallocated as percentages shift), by 10 PM the predictions have pretty much reached their final destination.

(And by the way, we have a ton of mail-in ballots, too. The federal supreme court ruled in 2009 that everyone can have a mail-in ballot if they want, so it's getting more popular every election.)

If a citizen wants to check the election process, they can go to any polling place (including the ones where mail-in ballots are counted) and watch the polling workers count the paper ballots. The volunteers are obligated to announce the final tallies to all citizens that are present to observe. (There are not always people present, but I've seen it happen a few times when volunteering as a polling worker.)

Then afterwards they can go to the state election office's website and verify that the same numbers appear for that particular voting district. I've done it once just to see how the verification process works, and I think the whole process is very easy to understand and verify for every citizen.