‘We don’t speculate’: How AP counts votes and calls races
As it has for more than 170 years, The Associated Press will count the nation’s vote in real time on Election Day and report the results of presidential, congressional and state elections on Nov. 3 and beyond.
AP will use that vote count to declare winners in some 7,000 races, so the world knows who wins not only the White House, but control of Congress and every state legislature.
“There is no national election commission in the United States that tells us who won on Election Day,” said David Scott, a deputy managing editor who helps oversee AP’s coverage of elections. “Statewide results aren’t available in every state, either. If we want to know who the next president will be, we’ve got to do the math ourselves — county by county nationwide.”
To do so, AP uses a 50-state network of local stringers who Scott said have trusted relationships with county clerks and other local officials built up over years of election night reporting. These stringers collect votes at a local level, including in Floyd and surrounding counties, while other AP journalists gather results from state or county websites, as well as via electronic data feeds from states.
That vote count is then transmitted to AP members and customers across the country and around the world, Scott said, powering their election night maps and filling the vote total graphics shown online and on air.
On election night, statebased analysts and editors in Washington at AP’s Decision Desk also use that vote count to “call races,” or declare the winners. Along with the vote count, Scott said, the decision team uses additional information provided by AP’s election research team, such as demographic data about a state and statistics about advance voting, to make race calls.
“AP does not make projections or name apparent or likely winners,” Scott said. “If AP cannot definitively say a candidate has won, we don’t speculate.”
Most famously, he said, AP did not call the closely contested race in 2000 between George W. Bush and Al Gore, standing by its assessment that the margin in Florida made it too close to call.