How can the AP call the US midterm elections just before the polls close? | | 2022 US midterm election news

explainer

Al Jazeera is using data from the Associated Press to determine midterm election winners.

The Associated Press was able to declare winners in several races shortly after midterm polls closed nationwide on Tuesday.

How is that possible before the results are announced? Let’s see how the AP declares the winner before the first votes are tallied.

First, a quick refresher on why and how the AP does this.

The country’s founders did not establish a national agency to count votes. Each state does it a little differently.

On election night, AP tallies votes across the country and aggregates millions of votes reported by local election officials to arrive at a grand total of thousands of elections. It’s been that way since AP counted the votes that ended in Zachary Taylor’s presidential election in 1848.

Aggregation methods include mass reserves, journalists from all 50 US states, and a network of approximately 4,000 stringers or temporary freelancers.

So what about those race calls that land the moment the votes close, before the votes are officially tallied?

Some constituencies are uncontested and others have only one candidate on the ballot. And while there are multiple candidate campaigns, the party or candidate has a past history of consistently convincing victories.

In these states, AP can confirm candidate wins using the results of the AP VoteCast, a survey of U.S. voters aimed at identifying why voters voted.

“The poll results, along with an analysis of early voting and other statistics, support our hope that longstanding political trends in these states will continue,” said the AP overseeing election coverage. Senior editor David Scott, who is helping to

Still, AP won’t call race winners before the final ballot ends in any jurisdiction, including states where all ballots don’t end at once.

AP does not make predictions, only when it determines that even if one candidate claims victory and the other concedes, there is no scenario that allows subsequent candidates to close the gap. , declare the winner, said Scott. He noted that declaring victory was premature and concessions could be withdrawn.

“The only time we call a competition and send out an APNewsAlert declaring a candidate won is when we determine that the following candidate no longer has a winning path,” says Scott. “In a small number of cases, it could happen as soon as all the votes are finished.”