News media don’t run elections. Why do they call the winners?

WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s election night, the polls have closed and chances are you’re waiting on The Associated Press or one of the major television networks to say who will be the next president. But why does the news media play that role in the first place? Shouldn’t that be the government’s job?

State and local governments do run and administer American elections, including the race for president. They are responsible for counting the votes and maintaining the official record of who won and by how much.

But the official process — from poll close to final certification — can take the states anywhere from several days to more than a month. In the race for the White House, it’s not until early January that the formal process of picking the president via the Electoral College is complete. No federal agency or election commission provides updates to the public in the meantime about what’s happening with their votes.

“That’s a gap in the Constitution left by the founders that AP stepped in to fill just two years after our company was founded,” said David Scott, a vice president at AP who oversees the news agency’s election operations. “It was essential then, as it is today, that Americans have an independent, non-partisan source for the whole picture of the election — most critically of the very vital news of who has won the election.”

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A brief history of race calls

The AP was formed in 1846 as a newspaper cooperative. It tabulated election results for the first time two years later, when Zachary Taylor won the presidential election as a member of the Whig Party. The effort to gather the results from jurisdictions across the still-young nation relied on the telegraph, lasted 72 hours and had a then-exorbitant cost of $1,000.

In 1916, the first election broadcast aired over a small network of ham radios, according to a history written by the late CBS News Political Director Martin Plissner. The announcer closed the program by incorrectly declaring that Republican Charles Evans Hughes had won the presidency over Democrat Woodrow Wilson. The AP called the race for Wilson two days later once it was able to report results from California.

By the early 1960s, the AP and the three broadcast networks — ABC, CBS and NBC — were each conducting independent vote counts. They agreed to pool their resources in the 1964 election to compile the vote count for key races, an arrangement that would last in some form for more than 50 years and eventually expand to include exit polling of Election Day voters.

After the 2016 election, the AP left the network pool to continue its independent vote count operation and launch the AP VoteCast survey of the American electorate as an alternative to the network’s exit polls. The networks, now including CNN, remain with the pool today and receive their vote count and exit poll data from Edison Research. Fox News subscribes to AP’s vote count, as do thousands of news organizations across the United States and around the world, and partners with the AP to conduct the VoteCast survey.

Counting the vote

In counting the vote, the AP isn’t actually tabulating the results of individual voters’ actual ballots. That work is performed by the local government election officials who administer elections in the United States.

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Outside of setting some broad guidelines, the Constitution leaves the details of actually running elections to the states, which means there are 51 (don’t forget the District of Columbia) different sets of rules on how to run elections.

Some of those rules are more voter-friendly than others.

In New Hampshire, election results could be officially certified a few days after Election Day. In California, the tabulation process takes several weeks and final election results are not made available until early December. The rest of the states fall somewhere in between.

In reporting their results, some jurisdictions use a format that makes it difficult to immediately determine who won, such as not including percentages with the raw vote totals or displaying candidate vote totals for the same contest across multiple pages of a scanned PDF document. Most election officials post unofficial results for their county or town online on election night; a handful don’t release even initial results until later.

The AP’s vote count, Scott said, is an effort to make sense of all that information. “What we’re doing is stitching all of vote totals together from thousands of counties and towns nationwide into a single, standardized format, so that voters have access to the overall vote count for a race,” he said.

Declaring election winners

The presidential election has more moving parts than any other contest on the ballot, including the complexities of the Electoral College. The Constitution directs each state to determine its own electors and send the results of their votes for president to the National Archives and to Congress, to be tallied a few weeks after Election Day.

In modern elections, with states having directed electors to vote for the winner of the popular vote in their state, voters know who has won the White House well before the formalities of the Electoral College play out through the “race calls” made by the AP and the networks. They’re not official government decrees, but they provide the country with a timely and independent assessment of the state of a race.

“The AP’s standard is to call a race whenever we are 100% certain there is no path for the trailing candidate to overtake the leading candidate,” said Anna Johnson, the news agency’s Washington bureau chief. “The AP uses that same standard for all race calls from the presidency all the way down the ballot. Independent and timely race calls by the AP and other media outlets help ensure voters understand not just who won a race, but how they won the race.”

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Read more about how U.S. elections work at Explaining Election 2024, a series from The Associated Press aimed at helping make sense of the American democracy. The AP receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.