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

Next Tuesday evening, millions of Americans will be glued to their television screens or refreshing their browser windows to see the latest election results, all in anticipation of the final election call. (Though 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 until all ballots cast are counted before announcing a winner. Thanks to the work of teams known colloquially as “decision tables”—groups of political scientists, statisticians, pollsters, and reporters using mountains of data, statistical models, etc.—they can often explain who won without attributing the full return Get on-the-ground reporting to understand which candidate is up where and how likely a candidate is to win in a particular district, county or state.

Given the doubts that former President Donald Trump has sown about both the electoral process and the media over the past eight years, it is worth understanding in detail how the processes of predicting and announcing election results work and why news consumers are attached to these results should trust.

“Remember, we don’t elect anyone,” Anthony Salvanto, who leads the network’s decision-making division as managing director of elections and polling at CBS News, told Vox. “The voters do that. Election officials are reporting on the vote, and what you are getting from us and the networks is our analysis of what they reported, as well as our first-hand accounts from conversations with voters.”

How exactly do news organizations figure out who will win?

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

Raw vote counts occur at the district, county and state levels, and these decision desks help both ensure that the vote meets their expectations and make decisions in 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, the news media will rely primarily on two systems to make their forecasts.

AP and Fox News use a system called AP VoteCast, which was introduced in 2018 and has been used in all national elections since then. Unlike previous practice, VoteCast no longer relies on election polls, but instead uses large-scale online surveys of registered voters randomly selected from a probability-based sample to provide the most accurate representative sample possible.

Another method is used by the National Election Pool (NEP), which provides data to ABC News, CBS News, CNN and NBC News. The NEP relies on Edison Research to conduct three types of surveys: Election Day surveys, in-person early exit polls and likely voter surveys to collect data from those likely to vote by mail, Rob Farbman, executive vice President at Edison Research, said 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 such as the Economist and The Hill — and Vox.com in 2020 — does not use voter polls and instead relies on a proprietary statistical methodology to pick winners.)

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

Sometimes that can lead to one decision-making department getting ahead of the others, as in 2020, when Fox News decision-making chief Arnon Mishkin called Arizona for President Joe Biden much earlier than any other news source, including the AP, or when the decision division headquarters called the race well ahead of other experts.

However, when it comes time to make a call, “our decision team will review all models we use, consult with the networks' decision teams, and consider possible data issues to ensure that our call may be incorrect.” is sufficiently small Farbman said. “Generally, we will not make a call unless we are 99.5 percent confident in the call.”

Likewise, the AP will not call an election until “we are confident that there is no chance that the final candidate can catch up,” said David Scott, AP vice president and head of news strategy and operations.

The combination of inputs allows the services to understand exactly who won each of the roughly 5,000 elections this year, from the presidential race to local contests and down-ballot measures. And they can do this quickly, without having to wait for poll workers to count every vote. That's true even in the case of a close race (as the presidential race is expected to be), although it's a little more complicated to call.

“If there's a very close race, you look at where the outstanding votes are, what votes haven't been reported yet, and you look at the places where the outstanding votes are coming from,” Salvanto, of CBS News, said. “You look at whether it was a mail-in vote or an Election Day vote and whether there are differences in the patterns that you saw depending on the type of ballot.”

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

“We will tell you whether our models show that this is a mishap or that it goes one way or the other,” Salvanto said. “We show you in real time where the counted votes are coming in – from which districts, from which parts of the state and where they are still outstanding, where we know that there are registered voters and we know that there are still reports about them.” Coming You 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 incorrect. The most dramatic incident occurred in 2000, when news networks first called for Al Gore to come to Florida. Mistakes do happen – after all, decision-making bodies are made up of people – but when they do happen, companies work to correct them as quickly as possible. Still, errors are incredibly rare, so on Election Day (and the days after) you can be confident that you're seeing the actual results.