News media does not run elections. Why do they call the winners?

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

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

But the official process – from survey to final certification – can take anywhere from several days to more than a month. In the race for the White House, the formal process of electing the president by the Electoral College is not completed until early January. Meanwhile, no federal agency or election commission informs the public about what happens to their votes.

“This is a hole in the Constitution left by the founders that AP has closed just two years after our company was founded,” said David Scott, an AP vice president who oversees the news organization’s election operations. “It was important then, as it is now, that Americans have an independent, nonpartisan source for the big picture of the election — especially the very important news about who won the election.”

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The AP was founded in 1846 as a newspaper cooperative. Election results were recorded for the first time two years later, when Zachary Taylor won the presidential election as a member of the Whig Party. The attempt to collect results from the fledgling country's jurisdictions relied on the telegraph, took 72 hours and cost an exorbitant $1,000 at the time.

In 1916, the first election broadcast was broadcast over a small network of amateur radio stations, according to a story written by the late CBS News political director Martin Plissner. The announcer ended the broadcast by incorrectly declaring that Republican Charles Evans Hughes had won the presidency over Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Two days later, the AP called the race for Wilson after reporting the results from California.

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In the early 1960s, the AP and three broadcast networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, each conducted independent vote counts. They agreed to pool their resources to count votes for key races in the 1964 election, an agreement that would last in some form for more than 50 years and eventually expand to polling voters on Election Day.

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

Counting of votes

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

Aside from establishing some general guidelines, the Constitution leaves the details of how elections are actually conducted to the states, meaning that there are 51 (not forgetting the District of Columbia) different sets of rules for conducting elections.

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

In New Hampshire, the 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 released until early December. The rest of the states are somewhere in between.

Some jurisdictions use a format when reporting their results that makes it difficult to immediately determine who won, e.g. for example, by not including percentages in raw vote totals or by displaying candidates' vote totals for the same contest on multiple pages of a scanned PDF document. Most election officials post unofficial results for their county or city online on election night. a handful do not publish their first results until later.

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Scott said the AP vote count was an attempt to make sense of all that information. “What we do is combine all vote counts from thousands of counties and cities across the country into a single, standardized format so that voters have access to the total vote count for a race,” he said.

Announcement of the election winners

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

In modern elections, where states have instructed their electors to vote for the winner of the popular vote in their state, the AP's “race calls” let voters know who won the White House long before the Electoral College formalities were completed and the networks. These are not official government regulations, 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 percent certain that there is no way for the closing candidate to overtake the front-runner,” said Anna Johnson, the news agency's Washington bureau chief. “The AP uses the same standard for all election calls from the presidency to the vote. Independent and timely election calls from the AP and other media outlets help voters understand not only who won a race, but also how they won the race.”