Why is Alaska the last state to get called on Election Day?

It's because of the size of the US and time zones. Our polls are the last to close relative to the rest of the country. We are 4 hours behind Eastern Time so when polls close at 8pm on the east coast, it's still 4 in the afternoon in Alaska. When our polls close at 8pm Alaska time, it's midnight on the east coast. We are 1 hour behind California so their polls close before ours.

Because of time zones.

Look at a map. The continental USA has four, and Alaska is even further west than any of those, so it's in yet another time zone. Naturally they start and stop voting later there. And if they allow voting until midnight, of course they can't call it until very late. It just has to be that way in a big country - each state can decide voting hours that are convenient for the people there. Until polls have closed and been counted, you can't have a result. Of course that will be later in Alaska. The UK is small enough to be only in one time zone so it's easy for you not to think of that. (Now imagine what Russian elections must be like! They will have finished voting in Vladivostok when Moscow has only just started!)

To fill in some more, the electoral college IS a college, if you take a different meaning of college meaning "group of people". The US constitution provides that the President is elected by the electoral college, but it doesn't say how each state chooses its electoral college members. These days they always do it on the results of the election, but they don't actually have to.

And this is only for the President. There are also Congress, state governors, state legislatures, and more local things to elect. So what you get if you're American is a whole bunch of different elections every 2 years in November, with the presidential election being part of that only every other time.

The USA is a very different system from the UK. It is federal, so there is a state government to elect as well and we don't have that (you actually find if you live there is that most laws that affect you every day are state laws, and they can be different in the state next door), and the President is elected separately from Congress (Senators and Congressmen). So you CAN have a Congress that is opposed to the President. This often happens.

Say a President is elected for 4 years, but he turns out to be unpopular, and at the mid-term elections 2 years later for Congress, the country votes the other way. This doesn't happen in the UK because we don't elect the Prime Minister. That just gets sorted out from the results of the election for Parliament, so the Prime Minister and Parliament are always on the same side.

Being federal is why there is an electoral college. The Senate represents the states, so each one has 2 Senators however big or small the state is. The House of Representatives represents the people so it's just the same as our House of Commons - each Congressman represents roughly the same number of people, and occasionally the boundaries get moved as people move around. Great stuff but there can only be ONE President and how do you choose him while still reflecting the fact that there are states?

So what the Founding Fathers did when they wrote the constitution is have an electoral college, and each state gets as many electoral votes as its number of Senators plus number of Congressmen. Each state must have at least one Congressman or it wouldn't be represented in the House of Representatives at all, so the smallest number any state can have is 3, for 2 Senators plus 1 Congressman. That's what Alaska's got as a state with a very small population.

Look at a globe; locate the US, and then locate Alaska.

Alaska is west; they close their polls later, as you've pointed out. The media are not allowed to call any state until its polls are closed.

Of course it isn't unfair for Alaskans. Why would it be?

It's all about the time zones my friend

actually, Hawaii is usually called last