How and why does the AP announce winners on election night?

WASHINGTON (AP) — Will Zahran Mamdani be elected mayor of New York City? Who will be the next governor of New Jersey? Will California adopt a new congressional map?

Those are among the questions The Associated Press will answer when the news organization tabulates votes and announces winners in hundreds of races on ballots across the country on Tuesday.

It’s a role the AP has held for nearly 180 years, since shortly after its founding.

Determining the winner involves careful and comprehensive analysis of the most recent available vote counts and a variety of other election data. The ultimate goal is to answer this question: Is there any circumstance under which a trailing candidate can catch up to a candidate who is ahead? If the answer is no, it means that the main candidate has won.

Here’s a look at the AP’s role and process for determining election results, also known as calling the race:

Why AP calls races

The United States does not have a national body that collects and publishes election results. Elections are administered locally, through thousands of offices, according to standards set by the states. In many cases, states themselves do not even provide up-to-date tracking of election results.

The AP fills this gap by compiling voting results and declaring election winners, providing important information in the period between Election Day and the official certification of the results, which typically takes weeks.

Collect votes

The AP vote count collects information that may not be available online for days or weeks after the election or scattered across hundreds of local sites. Without national standards or consistent expectations across states, it also ensures that data is in a standard format, uses standard terminology and undergoes strict quality control.

The AP hires canvassing reporters who work with local election officials to collect results directly from the counties or precincts where votes are first being counted. These reporters send them by phone or electronically as soon as the results are available. If any of the results are available from state or county websites, AP will collect the results from there as well.

In many cases, counties will update vote totals as they count ballots throughout the night. The AP continually updates its count as these results are released. In the general election, AP will make up to 21,000 vote updates per hour.

He watches: An inside look at how the Associated Press calls the winners of thousands of races

Voting analysis

As the votes come in, the AP will analyze the races to determine the winners.

One of the key elements the AP takes into account is how many ballots were not counted and from which areas. In cases where official or accurate tallies of outstanding votes are not available, the AP estimates turnout in each 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 is also trying to determine how the ballots counted so far will be cast and what types of voting remain, such as mail-in ballots or in-person ballots on Election Day.

This is because the method voters choose can be linked to the party they voted for. Since mail voting became highly politicized in the 2020 election, Democrats were more likely to vote by mail, while Republicans were more likely to vote in person on Election Day.

In many states, it is possible to know which votes will be counted first, based on previous elections or plans announced by election officials. In other cases, sounds are clearly distinguished by type when they are made.

This helps determine whether an early lead is expected to shrink or grow. For example, if a state first counts votes cast in person on Election Day, followed by mail-in votes, that suggests Republicans’ early lead may shrink as more mail-in ballots are tabulated. But if the opposite is true and mail-in ballots are counted first, an early Republican lead could be the first sign of a comfortable victory.

Invitational races

In almost all cases, races can be announced long before all the votes are counted. The AP’s team of journalists and election analysts will call the race once a clear winner is determined.

In competitive races, AP analysts may need to wait for additional votes to be counted or to confirm specific information about the number of ballots remaining to be counted.

Competitive races where votes are actively tabulated — for example, in states that count a large number of votes after election night — may be considered “too early to call.” A race may be “too close to call” if the race is so close that there is no clear winner even after all ballots except provisional and late-arriving absentee ballots are counted.

The AP’s race calls are not predictions and are not based on speculation. These are statements based on analysis of voting results and other election data that one candidate has emerged as the winner and that no other candidate in the race will be able to overtake the winner once all the votes are counted.