The Associated Press’ role in calling races and polling voters

By HAYA PANJWANI and JAIME HOLGUIN The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Hundreds of news organizations, readers, listeners and viewers will look to the The Associated Press Decision Desk on Nov. 5 to learn dozens of election results. Some have already been looking to the AP to learn where voters stand on certain issues and candidates.

The AP has been calling elections since the 1800s. The work begins well before election night, with months of work leading up to the first Tuesday in November.

On this episode of The Story Behind the AP Story, a recurring audio production that features extended interviews with AP journalists, vice president of news operations David Scott walks listeners through what a typical election day looks like for the Decision Desk, and how the AP calls races. Emily Swanson, director of public opinion research, will explain how AP conducts its polling to understand voter sentiments.

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HAYA PANJWANI, HOST: The Decision Desk at The Associated Press has been calling races since 1848. David Scott, vice president and head of news strategy and operations at the AP, leads the team that does that in 2024.

SCOTT: Voters are voting. They’re out there. They’re casting their ballots, and the last ones to do so. So many Americans vote in advance these days. You get to sort of the late afternoon and, you know, the pizza’s coming at 5 or 6 o’clock before first polls close. But you’re doing your final prep work, you’re doing your final analysis. You’re going through your checklist to make sure that you’ve got all the information that you need.

And then around 6:30, 6 o’clock, votes start coming in. And then it just goes — it just goes — and there’s 5,000 races to call — contested races to call. And polls will keep closing up until 1 a.m. on the East Coast. Then, election night is not over. The vote count continues till 3 or 4 in the morning on the East Coast. And then we get up the next day and our team keeps counting the vote and we keep declaring it.

PANJWANI: I’m Haya Panjwani. In this episode of The Story Behind The AP story, we’ll be learning about how the AP calls races and how our polling team AP VoteCast operates.

SCOTT: So literally, at the dawn of the cooperative, two years after the Associated Press was founded, we decided as a membership cooperative that we weren’t going to wait any more for the time it would take for the mechanism of government to sort of collect all the votes and say who won.

On election night, we are still out there calling counties, putting reporters in county election offices, scraping websites, taking in data feeds from multiple sources. We are getting the vote, the results of the election, and we combine all those results together into one source, one feed, one graphic, one story, so that on election night or in the days thereafter, Americans can know and the world can know who Americans have picked to be their new leader.

This fall, in this year’s general election, we’ll tabulate results in 7,000 races total, including more than 5,000 contested races. For every race that we count the vote in, where we report results, we also declare a winner.

SWANSON: A lot of people think of the importance of polling around elections as being something that tells us who’s going to win.

PANJWANI: Emily Swanson is the director of public opinion research at the AP.

SWANSON: I tend to think that that is an overrated reason to think that polling is important. In part because polling by its very nature is an imprecise science and can’t necessarily tell us who is going to win, especially in a close election. But also because there’s so much more that polling has to offer. It can tell us what people find most important, what they think about those issues that they’re finding most important. And it can also tell us a lot about what people are experiencing.

PANJWANI: Since the 1960s, news organizations like the AP have used exit polls to survey voters and analyze election results. While this method has been effective, it has become harder in recent years as voting methods have evolved.

SWANSON: So many people now, instead of going to the polls, they vote by mail, they vote early in person. And it just became more and more difficult for us to reach the true universe of voters by talking to them in person at polling stations.

PANJWANI: So to address these challenges, AP VoteCast was created to accurately reflect the electorate regardless of how individuals cast their ballots.

SWANSON: One of my jobs, one of the Decision Desk’s jobs, is to reduce the number of unknowns. And to the extent that we can’t do that, reduce the number of unknown unknowns — make sure that the things we don’t know are things that we know we don’t know, and (that we) are able to factor the fact that we don’t know them into our decision making.

But the reality is that there can be new curveballs, new changes in the way that somebody counts their votes that could come at us. That’s always something that’s a little bit scary, and always something that we need to make sure that we have on the back of our minds when we’re doing important work that we really need to make sure that we get right.

SCOTT: Our standard for declaring winners in elections is 100%. If we don’t get every single one right, we consider that – now, I wouldn’t say a failure, but it’s an opportunity for improvement. We want to be right all the time. It’s really important to us that when we are declaring a winner, we are confident that there’s no chance the trailing candidate can catch up. And so our standard is 100%.

SWANSON: One thing that we’ve really had to pay more and more attention to on the Decision Desk is how different vote types impact how votes are counted. At least as much as if not more than geography does.

In a traditional election, 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago, the primary thing that we were looking at on Decision Desks was how specific counties are coming in and how that compares to past elections – and that’s pretty basic. But ultimately, that’s sort of like the core of what you’re doing when looking at an election. It’s what has already come in? What do we know about it and what do we know about the counties that are still out?

The major thing that has changed over the last 10 years or so and is only getting to be more of an issue is that now people are to a large extent voting by mail. They’re voting before Election Day. And it’s not just that more people are doing it, but that they’re different from the people who are voting on Election Day. It adds an additional dimension to what we need to pay attention to.

SCOTT: For years, we had all of these internal conversations in the newsroom about the status of the vote count or when it was the right time to call a winner, what we were looking for, what piece of information was missing that wasn’t allowing us to make a call. Then when we got it, OK, now’s the moment we can declare somebody the winner.

What we found is that, in this moment, those internal conversations needed to be journalism. We needed to be showing our work. Just like you’re back in high school and math class, you need to show your work. You need to show your proof of why this call was the right call to make at this time.

The audience for journalism in our country just expects more. Trust but verify, as President Reagan would say. They have an expectation that in order to trust, they want to see what’s gone into our reporting.

And, you know, think about it like a story, right? Like you don’t send out a headline. There’s the headline, but then there’s the story that has all the information, the background and the interviews and the context that explains what goes into that headline. And that’s the same sort of approach now we’re just taking with race calls.

There’s certainly been a rise of misinformation and disinformation, particularly on social media, places where those headlines in isolation can be challenged. And the best way to fight that, we think, is by showing our work, showing what’s taking place behind the scenes so that it’s not even really behind the scenes anymore. It’s just part of the journalism that goes into election night.

JAIME HOLGUIN, PRODUCER: This has been The Story Behind the AP Story. For more on AP’s election coverage, visit APNews.com.