Election 2024: When will we know who won and what will the media call the race?

On Tuesday night, millions of Americans will be glued to their TV screens or refreshing their browser windows to see the latest election returns, all in anticipation of a final race call. (Although we may not know the next president until days later.)

Counting ballots can take a while, but news organizations don’t necessarily have to wait for every ballot cast to be counted before announcing a winner. They are often able to declare who won without the full return, thanks to the work of teams colloquially known as “decision writers” – groups of political scientists, statisticians, pollsters and journalists who use mountains of data, statistical models and on-basis reporting to understand which candidate is up where and how likely a candidate is to win a given precinct, county or state.

Given the doubts that former President Donald Trump has sown over the past eight years, both about the election process and the media, it is worth understanding in detail how the processes of projecting and printing election results work and why consumers of news should rely on these results. .

“Remember we don’t choose anyone,” Anthony Salvantowho, as CBS News’ executive director of elections and investigations, oversees the network’s decision-making board, Vox said. “The voters do that. Election officials are reporting the vote, and what you’re getting from us and the networks is our analysis of what they’ve reported, as well as our first-hand reports from talking to voters.”

How do news organizations find out who wins?

To find out who won an election, news organizations such as Fox News, CNN, the Associated Press (AP) and others use a combination of data from election officials, statistical modeling, and polls and surveys of voters.

Raw vote tallies come in at the district, county and state levels, and these help decision writers both make sure the vote is in line with their expectations and make decisions about close contests. These expectations are shaped by statistical models based on history and other voter information, such as geographic location, gender, age and more.

This year, there are two main systems that news outlets will rely on for their projections.

AP and Fox News use a system called AP VoteCastwhich debuted in 2018 and has been used at every national election since. In a shift from past practice, VoteCast does not rely on exit polling, but instead uses large online surveys of registered voters selected at random from a probability-based samplingin an attempt to obtain the most accurate information from the most representative sample.

Another method is used by the National Election Pool (NEP), which provides data to ABC News, CBS News, CNN and NBC News. NEP relies on Edison Research to conduct three types of surveys: election day exit polls, in-person early voting exit polls, and polls of likely voters to capture data from those likely to vote per post, Rob Farbman, executive vice president at Edison Research, told Vox. (AP and Fox News used to be part of this group, but left after the 2016 election.)

(Decision Desk HQ, a private company that contracts with news organizations including the Economist and The Hill — and Vox.com in 2020 — doesn’t use voter surveys, relying instead on a proprietary statistical method for project winners.)

Each business and each agency creates its own criteria for interpreting these results.

Sometimes this can lead to one decision writer getting ahead of the others, like in 2020 when Fox News decision desk chief Arnon Mishkin called Arizona for President Joe Biden much earlier than any other news source, including the AP, or when Decision Desk HQ called the race way ahead of other pundits.

Overall, when it comes time to make a call, “Our decision team will examine all the models we run, consult with the network decision teams and consider any data issues to ensure that the possibility of our call being wrong is sufficiently small ,” Farbman said. “We generally won’t make a call unless we’re 99.5 percent sure of the call.”

Corresponding AP does not print elections until “we’re confident there’s no chance the successor candidate can catch up,” according to David Scott, the AP’s vice president and chief of news strategy and operations.

The combination of inputs allows the services to accurately understand who has won each of them around 5,000 choices this yearfrom the presidential race to local contests and ballot measures. And they can do it quickly without having to wait for election officials to count each vote. That’s true even in the case of a close race (as presidential elections are expected to be), though calling them is a bit more complicated.

“If you get a very close race, then you look at where the outstanding vote is, the vote that hasn’t been reported yet, and you look at the kinds of places that the outstanding vote is coming from,” Salvanto, of CBS News, said. “You look at whether it’s a mail-in vote or Election Day voting if there are differences in the patterns you’ve seen by ballot type.”

Along the way, news organizations keep viewers updated as polls close and votes come in, showing the public that the data used to make the calls is accurate.

“We’ll tell you if our models show it’s a toss up or it’s going one way or the other,” Salvanto said. “We’ll show you in real time where the counted vote is coming in — from which counties, which areas of the state, and where it’s still outstanding, where we know there are registered voters and we know there are still reports to come, so that the viewer can see the whole picture, as we see it.”

Of course, these methods are not perfect. Very occasionally, news organizations call a race wrong. The most dramatic case was in 2000, when news networks originally called Florida for Al Gore. Mistakes happen—after all, decision writers are human—but when they do, organizations work to correct them as quickly as possible. Still, errors are incredibly rare, so on Election Day (and the days after) you can be sure you’re seeing the right results.