Increase the jitter amount with the following:

  require('forecast/jitter').get = function(){return Math.random()*10;}

Election Time!

    require('forecast/jitter').get = function(){return new Date().getSeconds()-30;}

Haha, awesome find.

Did you just dig through the code or are you a NYT dev?

Dug through the code. Just inspected the element showing the number to get the class (.widget-info-display-cont) and searched through 'general-main.js' to find where the element is created. A timer that updates the value in the element is found ~100 lines further down.

What does the require statement do?

That's how they load the module that does the jittering. So by assigning its .get() method to be a noop instead (return 0), it does nothing (besides pointlessly return zero) when attempting to load.