Who won? How AP calls the election, in the ‘single largest act of journalism’

On election night - or, let’s face it, more likely election week, or weeks - Americans will finally find out whom they’ve chosen to lead their nation.

But the task of reporting the results doesn’t fall to a government body or federal official. Rather, in this country, figuring out the result of the central tenet of democracy is left to the media - and especially the Associated Press, which has one of the country’s largest vote-calling operations and has been doing this work for more than 175 years.

This year, the news service will call 6,823 winners - assuming no races go to runoffs - including winners in every statewide, House and state legislative race. It’s a massive endeavor, involving more than 5,000 people, and one that the AP internally refers to as “the single largest act of journalism that exists,” says Executive Editor Julie Pace.

Thousands of news organizations rely on the AP for reporting who won, including NPR, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Univision, Google and Apple. Some, like The Washington Post, use the AP for the vast majority of races, but for select races also use data from other nonpartisan organizations, such as Edison Research, and their own election models. Many television news networks have their own decision desks that call or project winners using data from Edison or other firms.

This year, the AP wants to reveal more about its process to inspire confidence in the results during such a tense political environment - an effort it has ramped up since the 2020 election, when Americans waited days to learn that Democratic candidate Joe Biden won the election.

Race calls that year were especially dramatic. Fox News first projected that Biden won Arizona on election night, followed hours later by the AP. The outlets faced some skepticism and criticism for making the Arizona call at a time when so many ballots were still uncounted and the results were so close; then-President Donald Trump was especially infuriated with Fox. Other TV networks waited days to call Arizona for Biden. In the end, Fox and the AP - and their methodologies - were right all along.

“It’s a huge responsibility. We know that when we call the race, it has to be right. There’s no other option,” Pace says. And it’s not just the presidential race. “We call races up and down the ballot, and they all have to be right because there is no other source of that race call in that time frame. That’s why we have stepped into this place.”

The AP says its accuracy rate for the past several general elections surpasses 99.9 percent. It never made a call in the 2000 presidential race between Al Gore and George W. Bush, when Florida’s incredibly close margin forced a recount that was eventually ended by the Supreme Court. The last erroneous call the AP made in a presidential contest occurred during the 2008 primaries, when it reversed its call that Hillary Clinton won Missouri over Barack Obama.

Every election, the AP refines its election-call operation. This year, it’s also publishing stories in advance with the kind of granular vote-count information that used to be circulated just within the AP and other newsrooms. It’s also preparing to push out text and video explainers as the count goes on during election night and beyond.

At its heart, calling an election sounds like solving a word problem in fourth-grade math: It’s election night, and the polls are closed. Ballots are still being tallied, and one candidate is currently behind. At this point, is it possible for the trailing candidate to overtake the lead and win?

If the answer is a definitive “no,” the AP calls the race.

“We take that question seriously,” says David Scott, who oversees the AP’s decision team as vice president and head of news strategy and operations. “There is data that goes into every race call. We’re not guessing. There has to be evidence.”

But getting to an answer is incredibly complex, since elections are not federally run. It requires navigating a web of state and county procedures, laws and habits.

Through Election Day and beyond, the AP will deploy more than 4,000 freelancers to election offices around the country to track and tally counts in real time. They will call in those numbers to about 800 vote entry clerks, who crunch the numbers and check them for accuracy.

About 60 people on the decision team - which exists year-around, even in non-election years - analyze the reports and focus only on making calls. “This is a full-time team that is deep in the weeds of election law and has a real-time understanding of what’s happening and changing on the ground in these states,” says AP Washington bureau chief Anna Johnson.

They map the counts against what they know about how elections run in each place, including how slow or quick counts tend to be in certain places, and any rules dictating how the process goes. For instance, in some states, mail-in ballots are counted first, while in others, they have to wait until polls are closed to start counting. The decision desk also takes into account data from a survey of voters and nonvoters called AP VoteCast, which is also used by Fox’s decision team.

Okay, so, it’s election night - or week - and the numbers are coming in. Who makes the call in the race for president?

A race caller - who is assigned to one state and has a deep knowledge of the state and has been calling races there for years - works with a statewide analyst. If those two agree the trailing candidate cannot win, they make the call recommendation to a decision editor. If all three agree, the AP makes the call.

But once the electoral college count gets close to 270 votes - the number required to win - higher-level editors, including Pace, Johnson and Scott, get more involved before the final call is made.

The pressure to put out the call as soon as possible has been heightened in an era in which a vacuum of real information is being filled with false claims. “Being fast is important,” Johnson says. “But accuracy is the absolute gold standard. So we balance that by, if we are not certain, we’re not going to call the race. But if we’re certain, we’re going to call the race.”

And if a particular candidate is upset with a race call and tries to get AP to change its mind, “you can lobby to your heart’s content, but what the numbers say are what the numbers say,” Scott says. “The voters get to decide, and we are driven entirely by the data.”

Election night at the AP is sort of like the Olympics. As soon as one is over, it begins making adjustments and training for the next. Scott already has a bunch of sticky notes on his desk with notes about what needs to be tweaked for 2025.

Despite all their plans for 2024, the specter of misinformation - about race calls, vote totals or even simple facts, like when polling places close - keeps AP executives like Pace up at night. She points to all the preparation they’ve done to counter false claims by pushing out fact-based information.

“But it’s a challenge to make sure that information is traveling as fast and as widely as misinformation travels,” Pace says. “So that’s the thing that I worry about: How do we make sure that what we’re doing - which I think is going to be a really important public service in a really crucial time - how do we make sure that that information is keeping pace with misinformation? And that’s not something we can fully control.”