Explaining Election Day: How AP declares winners

(8 Oct 2024)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:

ASSOCIATED PRESS
Washington – 26 September 2024
1. SOUNDBITE (English) Stephen Ohlemacher, The Associated Press:
"At the Associated Press, we declare winners on election night when we determine that there is no path for the trailing candidates to catch the leader. We rely on AP research to help us prepare. We rely on AP reporters for their coverage. We rely on sophisticated models to help us, but the actual race call is always done by a trained analyst who has spent months preparing at the associated press. We don’t do projections, we don’t do predictions. We make declarations on election night. We consider our race calls to be the final word on the outcome of an election."
2. Zoom in on AP Logo inside the DC bureau

ASSOCIATED PRESS
ARCHIVE: Washington – 5 March 2024
3. Mid of AP employees working at desks during the Super Tuesday presidential primary elections

ASSOCIATED PRESS
ARCHIVE: New York – 8 November 2016
4. Timelapse of AP NY staffers on election night

ASSOCIATED PRESS
ARCHIVE: Washington – 15 January 2024
5. Close AP logo on glass to the Master Control room
6. Pan of screens inside Master Control room

ASSOCIATED PRESS
Washington – 26 September 2024
7. Screen displays AP Election 2024 graphic
STORYLINE:
One question will be asked over and over again on election night: who won? The Associated Press will answer that question for nearly 7,000 races across the country and up and down the ballot, from president to state ballot measures to a variety of local offices.

What goes into these race calls? A careful and thorough analysis of the latest available vote tallies and a variety of other election data.

The AP has compiled vote results and declared winners in elections for more than 170 years, filling what could otherwise be a critical information void of up to a month between Election Day and the official certification of results.

Race calls are based on provable facts, primarily from AP’s vote count, which is compiled from state and local elections offices across the country. As more and more ballots are tabulated starting on election night, the AP will monitor the incoming vote at the county level and analyze what areas the votes are coming from.

At the same time, it tries to determine throughout the night how many ballots are still uncounted and from what areas. State and local elections officials don’t immediately know by election night exactly how many ballots were cast in every contest, in part because of the growing number of ballots cast by mail that may arrive after Election Day. This means there are usually no official and exact tallies of the outstanding vote to rely on once the vote-counting gets underway. As a result, the AP estimates the turnout in every race based on several factors and uses that estimate to track how much of the vote has been counted and how much remains.

The AP also tries to determine how the ballots were cast, as the method a voter chooses often speaks to whom they voted for. Since the issue of voting by mail became highly politicized in the 2020 election, most mail votes have been cast by Democratic voters, while most in-person Election Day votes have been cast by Republicans.

AP researchers have also collected data from past elections from every state on how they have conducted vote counts in the past and in what order votes generally get counted. This is helpful because if a state first counts votes cast in-person on Election Day, followed by votes cast by mail, that suggests that an early Republican lead in the vote count may narrow as more mail ballots are tabulated.

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Author: AP Archive
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