News media do not organize elections. Why do they name the winners?

Counting the votes

When counting votes, the AP does not actually map the results of individual voters’ actual ballots. That work is performed by the local government election officials who administer elections in the United States.

Aside from setting some general guidelines, the Constitution leaves the details of actually conducting elections up to the states, meaning there are 51 (don’t forget the District of Columbia) different rules for conducting 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 announced until early December. The other states are somewhere in between.

When reporting their results, some jurisdictions use a format that makes it difficult to immediately determine who won, such as not including percentages in raw vote totals or displaying the vote totals of candidates in the same contest across multiple pages of a scanned PDF document. Most election officials post unofficial results for their county or city online on election night; a handful only release the first results later.

According to Scott, the AP vote count is an attempt to make sense of all that information. “What we do is aggregate all the vote totals from thousands of counties and cities across the country into one standardized format so that voters can access the total votes for a race,” he said.

Announce election winners

The presidential election has more moving parts than any other electoral contest, 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, where states have instructed electors to vote for the winner of the popular vote in their state, voters know who won the White House well before the formalities of the Electoral College play out through the AP’s “race calls.” and the networks. They are not official government decrees, but they provide the country with a timely and independent assessment of the condition of a breed.

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