Will Zohran Mamdani be elected New York City mayor? Who will be the next governor of New Jersey? Will California adopt a new congressional map?
Those are among the questions The Associated Press will answer when the news organization tabulates votes and declares winners in hundreds of races that are on ballots nationwide Tuesday.
It’s a role the AP has filled for nearly 180 years, since shortly after its founding.
Determining a winner involves a careful and thorough analysis of the latest available vote tallies and a variety of other election data. The ultimate goal is to answer this question: Is there any circumstance in which the trailing candidate can catch up to the candidate who is leading the race. If the answer is no, then the leading candidate has won.
Here’s a look at the AP’s role and its process for determining the outcome of elections, also known as calling a race:
Why AP calls races
The United States does not have a nationwide body that collects and releases election results. Elections are administered locally, by thousands of offices, following standards set by the states. In many cases, the states themselves do not even offer up-to-date tracking of election results.
The AP fills this gap by compiling vote results and declaring winners in elections, providing critical information in the period between Election Day and the official certification of results, which typically takes weeks.
Collecting the vote
The AP’s vote count brings together information that otherwise might not be available online for days or weeks after an election or is scattered across hundreds of local websites. Without national standards or consistent expectations across states, it also ensures the data is in a standard format, uses standard terms and undergoes rigorous quality control.
The AP hires vote count reporters who work with local election officials to collect results directly from counties or precincts where votes are first counted. These reporters submit them, by phone or electronically, as soon as the results are available. If any of the results are available from state or county websites, the AP will gather the results from there, too.
In many cases, counties will update vote totals as they count ballots throughout the night. The AP is continuously updating its count as these results are released. In a general election, the AP will make as many as 21,000 vote updates per hour.
