In the lead up to Nov. 5th, David Scott, the AP vice president who oversees our elections operation, explains how AP calls races every election cycle and the detailed process we follow to declare winners with certainty:
How does AP determine when a race is ready to be called?
Declaring a winner in an election really comes down to a single, simple question: Can the candidate(s) trailing the leader catch up? Once the AP decision team is certain – and we must be certain – that the answer is no, we can call a race.
The answers to that question are often quite complex and as varied as the many ways American states administer their elections. We find those answers by looking at every possible piece of data. That starts with the AP vote count but also includes data collected by AP’s Election Research team on registration, advance vote, past elections and always evolving election rules, as well as the details on how and when each state releases results on election night and in the days that follow.
We also pay a lot of attention to the Election Research team’s estimate of how many ballots are still left to count. In the tightest races, we may need to confirm directly with election officials how many ballots they have left to count – or even that there are no ballots remaining – before we can be certain of the winner.
And in a general election, we’re looking at details from AP VoteCast, our wide-ranging survey of the American electorate.
All of that data is fed into our state-of-the-art analytical tools. When it comes to the most important and closely contested races at the top of the ticket, all members of the decision team have to agree that a race is ready to be called.
We’re not aiming to be right most of the time, or even almost all of the time. We hold ourselves to the standard of being right 100% of the time. That’s why we say AP doesn’t make projections: we’re looking at the facts and saying that this is the candidate who has won.
Why and how is AP able to call a race as soon as the polls close?
To start, AP never calls a race before the final statutory poll close time for that race. And we never declare a winner without data from voters indicating who they have chosen in an election. AP’s decision team does not guess.
On election night, there are sometimes statewide races – most often for president, Senate and governor – that we can call at the moment polls close. In these cases, we use every piece of information we have available, including historical voting patterns and voter registration statistics, along with results from AP VoteCast, our survey of voters as they cast ballots in the election, to confirm a candidate’s victory.
The results from the poll — along with our analysis of early voting and other statistics — allow us to say with certainty that our expectation that longstanding political trends in a state or race will hold.
What, if anything, is different about the way AP will declare winners this year?
There is so much. We never miss an opportunity to learn from an election and improve our process, our tools and our analytical capabilities. With our new elections technology platform, we’re able to collect and examine more data in greater detail than ever before.
But without question, our most important innovation and iteration for 2024 is how we’ve reshaped our entire approach to coverage of elections to center explanatory journalism. Explaining how we know who won – rather than only making the race calls – is something we dabbled with in 2020, but it’s since become a hallmark of our election news report. That effort will expand dramatically this November.
Turning process into content is something the operations geek in me loves just to death, and it all goes back the AP decision team’s North Star: We will show our work and expand our reporting so that our race calls and storytelling can be accepted by our audience as well understood facts.
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