@TerryHancock

American elections are all run independently by each state, which means this stuff needs a large degree of local knowledge. And Alaska, due to it's geography, climate, ranked choice voting and a few other factors is a bit more unusual than most.

In general, with slowly trickling in results, the thing to look for two things: "Who is still counting/who is done" (by precinct, by county, rural - suburban -urban) and "what type of ballots are done/still being counted" (mail votes, early voting, election day -- some states offer all three, some two. I'm not sure if there are any states that only do election day, in person voting but there might be).

Because there is a significant political polarization between rural voters and urban voters, and one between early voters (including mail-in) and election day voters -- what's left and where they're from is one of the key things used by media and election watchers to determine results -- as the official count might not be finished for days.

You end up with states where, due how they count, you might see rural counties finished counting while urban counties are just starting.

Or you might quickly get the tallies of everyone who voted early or whose mailed-in ballots arrived prior to election day right away, but the election day votes will take hours.

I think they changed it, but In Pennsylvania they didn't even open mail-in ballots until election day proper, nor start processing and counting them until after the polls closed. So the election day voters were tallied quickly, the mail-in voters took days.