The Associated Press: A long history of counting and calling elections
The Associated Press (AP), a global news cooperative, has been making the official call on who wins U.S. presidential elections since 1848.
On Election Day, this year on Nov. 5, the AP tabulates thousands of elections at the same time, including state legislature races, congressional races, the presidential race, and ballot measures to a variety of local offices in all 50 states.
“We will declare winners in 5,000 contested races across the country without fear or favor, just based on the facts,” AP Executive Editor Julie Pace wrote in a column. “While we strive to report the results as quickly as possible, our primary focus is to get it right — no matter how long it may take.”
The AP was founded in New York City, where it’s still headquartered, in 1846. Moses Yale Beach, the publisher of a now defunct newspaper called the New York Sun, convinced four other city newspaper publishers to fund a “pony express route” through Montgomery, Alabama to bring news of the Mexican American War to their readers faster than the post office. The news would be carried from horseback to stagecoach to telegraph before finally reaching New York.
The pony express eventually became the AP. In 1848, the AP called the presidential election for Zachary Taylor, the 12th U.S. president. The organization went on to pioneer a firm nonpartisan stance as they became a “quasi-official recorder of election results nationwide.” Today, the AP operates 248 bureaus in 99 countries.
“Since the dawn of the republic, elections in the U.S. have been administered at the state and local levels; there is no federal body that counts the vote or shares results. This is why the AP stepped in to fill that void shortly after our founding in 1846 — to independently deliver election results to the world,” wrote Pace. “We play a crucial role in the American democratic process. We’ve carried out this responsibility through world wars and pandemics, political and social unrest. No organization has been calling elections longer than the AP.”
Elections will usually be called well before 100% of the votes have been counted on election night at the close of the polls. These results are unofficial mostly because absentee and mail-in ballots aren’t counted until after Election Day, a common occurrence that’s come under scrutiny in recent years.
The AP uses election data, like voting trends for a particular area or shifting demographics among racial groups, and specific tools like AP VoteCast to determine the “clear winners” in every race they run. They estimate voter turnout in every race and use that to estimate how much of the vote has been counted and how much remains. The AP also tries to determine how ballots counted were cast and the types of votes that remain.
In past elections, more Democrats have voted by mail and more Republicans have voted in-person on Election Day, said the AP. This helps the AP to know if an early lead is expected to shrink or grow after the polls close.
Regardless of the Herculean undertaking it has taken the AP to count thousands of races accurately for the last almost two centuries, the American voter’s confidence in election results has wavered since 2020. Which underscores years of division along party lines fueled by former President Donald Trump’s campaign lies that the election was stolen.
Their AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found last year that 71% of Democrats, compared to the 22% of Republicans, have confidence that the votes cast in the 2024 presidential election will be counted properly.
Because of this doubt, the AP is “doubling down on its efforts,” said Pace.
“We know it’s not enough to report the results,” wrote Pace. “We need to show our work — be clear about the numbers we’ve crunched, where they came from, and how we’ve ensured their integrity. You have our commitment to being as transparent as possible about our race calling process.”
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