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Why news media calls election winners



By ROBERT YOON

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

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

But the official process — from poll close to final certification — can take the states anywhere from several days to more than a month. In the race for the White House, it’s not until early January that the formal process of picking the president via the Electoral College is complete. No federal agency or election commission provides updates to the public in the meantime about what’s happening with their votes.

“That’s a gap in the Constitution left by the founders that AP stepped in to fill just two years after our company was founded,” said David Scott, a vice president at AP who oversees the news agency’s election operations. “It was essential then, as it is today, that Americans have an independent, non-partisan source for the whole picture of the election — most critically of the very vital news of who has won the election.”

A brief history of race calls

The AP was formed in 1846 as a newspaper cooperative. It tabulated 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 across the still-young nation relied on the telegraph, lasted 72 hours and had a then-exorbitant cost of $1,000.

In 1916, the first election broadcast aired over a small network of ham radios, according to a history written by the late CBS News Political Director Martin Plissner. The announcer closed the program by incorrectly declaring that Republican Charles Evans Hughes had won the presidency over Democrat Woodrow Wilson. The AP called the race for Wilson two days later once it was able to report results from California.

By the early 1960s, the AP and the three broadcast networks — ABC, CBS and NBC — were each conducting independent vote counts. They agreed to pool their resources in the 1964 election to compile the vote count for key races, an arrangement that would last in some form for more than 50 years and eventually expand to include exit polling of Election Day voters.

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

Counting the vote

In counting the vote, the AP isn’t actually tabulating the results of individual voters’ actual ballots. That work is performed by the local government election officials who administer elections in the United States.

Outside of setting some broad guidelines, the Constitution leaves the details of actually running elections to the states, which means there are 51 (don’t forget the District of Columbia) different sets of rules on how to run elections.



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