In presidential elections, calling the results in one state, even though all the polls there are closed, may affect the voting in some distant state in a different time zone. Congress says it may fix that problem by standardizing poll closing hours across the country in federal elections. That may be tough to do, given the three-hour time difference between the East and West coasts. And then there's Hawaii. Election Day belongs to the voters and to the candidates.
Candidates deserve to get as many voters as possible to participate in an election.
They've spent a lot of money on their campaigns and worked hard, and they ought to get every vote that's coming their way. An early call of results might deny them a full turnout. It's best that the news media adopt their own rules limiting premature disclosure of polling results to avoid a constitutional crisis over First Amendment rights. There have been complaints as far back as Jimmy Carter's failed re-election bid in 1980 that the networks discourage late voting in the western states. They announce election results in the eastern states so early that folks who haven't yet exercised their franchise in the rest of the country assume their vote would be meaningless, so they skip the process.