It’s election night, the polls are closed, and chances are you’re waiting for the Associated Press or one of the major television networks to say who the next president will be.
But why does the media play this role in the first place? Shouldn’t that be the government’s job?
State and local governments conduct and administer America’s 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 formal process — from close to final certification — can take states anywhere from a few days to more than a month. In the race for the White House, the official process of selecting a president through the Electoral College was not completed until early January.
No federal agency or election commission is providing the public with up-to-date information about what’s happening with their votes in the meantime.
“This is a constitutional gap left by the founders that AP stepped in to fill just two years after our company was founded,” said David Scott, AP vice president who oversees the news agency’s election operations.
“It was important then, as it is today, that Americans have an independent, cross-partisan source for the entire election picture — most critically for the very vital news of who won the election.”
A Brief History of Race Talk
AP was established in 1846 as a newspaper cooperative. He brought up the 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 in the still-young nation relied on the telegraph, took 72 hours, and had a then-exorbitant cost of $1,000.
In 1916, the first campaign broadcast was broadcast over a small network of amateur radio stations, according to a history written by the late CBS News political director Martin Plissner.
The announcer closed the program by incorrectly announcing that Republican Charles Evans Hughes had won the presidency over Democrat Woodrow Wilson.
The AP called the race for Wilson two days later after it was able to report the results from California.
Until the early 1960s, the AP and the three broadcast networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—conducted independent vote counts.
They agreed to pool their resources in the 1964 election to compile vote counts for key races, an arrangement that would last in some form for more than 50 years and eventually expand to include voter exit polling on election day.
After the 2016 election, the AP left the network pool to pursue its independent vote-counting operation and launch the AP VoteCast survey of the American electorate as an alternative to the network’s exit polls.
The networks, including CNN, remain in the pool today and get their vote count and exit poll data from Edison Research.
Fox News subscribes to the AP vote count, as do thousands of news organizations in the United States and around the world, and partners with the AP to conduct the VoteCast survey.
Counting of votes
In counting the vote, the AP does not actually tabulate the results of the actual ballots of individual voters. This work is done by local government officials who administer elections in the United States.
Besides 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 sets of rules for how to conduct elections.
Some of these rules are more voter-friendly than others.
In New Hampshire, election results can be officially certified a few days after Election Day. In California, the tabulation process takes several weeks, and final election results are not available until early December. The rest of the states fall 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 of the vote total or showing the vote totals of candidates for the same race 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 don’t even publish initial results until later.
The AP vote count, Scott said, is an attempt to make sense of all that information.
“What we’re doing is tying together all the vote totals from thousands of counties and cities across the country into one standardized format so voters can access the vote totals for a given race,” he said.
Announcing the winners of the elections
Presidential elections have more moving parts than any other race on the ballot, including the complexity of the Electoral College. The Constitution directs each state to designate its electors and send the results of their presidential votes to the National Archives and to Congress to be tallied a few weeks after Election Day.
In modern elections, when states have directed electors to vote for the winner of the popular vote in their state, voters know who has won the White House long before the Electoral College formalities are played out through the “race calls” made by the AP and the networks.
They are 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 when we’re 100 percent sure the trailing candidate has no way of getting ahead of the front-runner,” said Anna Johnson, the news agency’s Washington bureau chief. “The AP uses the same standard for all race calls from the presidency to the end of the vote. Independent and timely calls from the AP and other media outlets help voters understand not only who won the race, but how they won the race.”
(This story was not edited by News18 staff and was published by a syndicated news agency feed – Associated Press)
