Can you describe the size and scale of AP’s team and the vote count process on election night?
There’s a saying on the Elections team: what AP does to count the vote and declare winners in an American presidential election is the world’s single largest act of journalism. In all, about 5,000 people will take part in our efforts to collect, count, verify and publish the results of the November election. That includes a network of 4,000 vote count reporters, who will staff county election and town clerk offices nationwide once polls close. They’ll be backed up by a team that collects results from state and county websites, as well as via electronic data feeds from states. Those vote totals will be scrutinized for accuracy and, once verified, plugged into AP’s election system for transmission to customers across the globe.
That monumental effort is required so that voters can know who they’ve picked to lead them as soon as possible after polls close. There is no national election commission in the U.S. that tells us who won on Election Day. If we want to know who the next president will be, we've got to do the math ourselves – which is what AP has done since 1848.
How does AP make sure the count is accurate?
Accuracy is everything to the AP, and elections aren’t any different. We start by not relying on a single source for the vote count. We’re getting results from those vote count reporters, which we check against what elections officials post online or send via a feed. That allows us to put AP’s vote count through an intense verification process. We ask vote count reporters detailed questions to verify their information, our election system includes dozens of automated quality control checks, and our full-time staff of election researchers monitors and examines the results for anomalies throughout the course of an election.
As part of our efforts to ensure accuracy, we also rigorously test our systems for weeks before Election Day. In fact, we started testing for this year’s general election sooner than we ever have before. Those tests include sending randomly generated test data to customers to make sure their systems are working and our numbers will appear correctly in their graphics once polls close.
Why might election results fluctuate on election night?
Elections are messy. They’re human exercises conducted by thousands of election officials and volunteers in thousands of jurisdictions nationwide, where roughly 160 million voters will cast a ballot – most often with paper and pen. Mistakes are bound to happen along the way, but we know from past elections and the certification process that follows Election Day that those mistakes are caught and corrected. Via the quality checks AP conducts on the results we collect and tabulate, we’re often the first ones to spot such mistakes. However, every now and then, an error does make it past both election officials and the AP. That’s not necessarily a sign of anything nefarious. We look into these errors and fix them as soon as they are discovered.
Learn more about how AP counts the vote.
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