It would be surprising if even one in a thousand voters knew that the media can call a state winner in a presidential election before any Election Day votes made in voting booths are counted. In so-called noncompetitive contests, the media can, and do, declare winners immediately after the polls close.

Even fewer voters might be aware that in such noncompetitive races, the calling of a winner right when polls close is based in part on a survey called AP VoteCast conducted by an academic institution before and during the election. Your vote on Election Day is therefore made irrelevant to the immediate decision to call the race, supplanted by a preelection survey you’ve never heard of administered by an organization you don’t know about combined with undisclosed theoretical modeling done by the media’s decision desks.