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In African elections, the period between polling and announcement can be protracted and tense. In the best cases, this intermission is marked by hopeful candidates urging tense supporters to stay calm. In the worst cases, such periods are used by politicians to hurl accusations of fraud back and forth to work up partisanship and devalue electoral institutions. The days between an election and its results are stressful because incomplete information about this constituency or that trickles out, but partisans have few systematic ways to compare these data with past results or exit polling, and worry that the missing data are somehow being tampered with. This paper shows how OLS regression using past results to fill in partial results can not only reduce uncertainty in the short term, but may also point out whether or not withheld results seem plausible. What began as a simple social media experiment is presented here as an elegant formula that accurately predicts outcomes across Ghana's Fourth Republic and in Nigeria's 2015 presidential election. This accuracy was achieved with as little as 10% of the results in, and extremely biased samples.

University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. His research focuses on the use of an ethnomethodological, conversation analytic approach for examining ways in which membership categories, particularly racial categories, are used, reproduced and resisted in talk-in-interaction.Kim Baldry is a researcher at the Centre for Social Development in Africa, Johannesburg. She is primarily involved in monitoring and evaluation studies and in research concerned with (un)employment in South Africa. 2 AbstractResearch based on interviews and focus groups has been characterized by a shift toward treating them as objects of inquiry in their own right, rather than simply as data collection instruments for the purposes of providing insights into other phenomena of interest. In this paper, we contribute to research in this area by examining phenomena at the intersection of openings of interactions and membership categorization, specifically in the context of interviews and focus group interactions. We do so by examining a set of recorded interview and focus group interactions, considering how categories belonging to different types of membership categorization devices (omni-relevant, contingently omni-relevant, and contingent) are treated as relevant and procedurally consequential, observably shaping participants' conduct in the openings of the interactions. Our findings demonstrate some ways in which these different types of membership categories surface in the moment-by-moment unfolding of these parts of the interactions.

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