Why news media call election winners

By ROBERT YOON

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

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

But the official process – from survey to final certification – can take anywhere from several days to more than a month. In the race for the White House, the formal process of electing the president by the Electoral College is not completed until early January. Meanwhile, no federal agency or election commission informs the public about what happens to their votes.

“This is a hole in the Constitution left by the founders that AP has closed just two years after our company was founded,” said David Scott, an AP vice president who oversees the news organization’s election operations. “It was important then, as now, that Americans have an independent, nonpartisan source for the big picture of the election — especially the very important news about who won the election.”

A Brief History of Racial Appeals

The AP was founded in 1846 as a newspaper cooperative. Election results were recorded for the first time two years later, when Zachary Taylor won the presidential election as a member of the Whig Party. The attempt to collect results from the fledgling country’s jurisdictions relied on the telegraph, took 72 hours and cost an exorbitant $1,000 at the time.

In 1916, the first election broadcast was broadcast over a small network of amateur radio stations, according to a story written by the late CBS News political director Martin Plissner. The announcer ended the broadcast by incorrectly declaring that Republican Charles Evans Hughes had won the presidency over Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Two days later, the AP called the race for Wilson after reporting the results from California.

In the early 1960s, the AP and three broadcast networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, each conducted independent vote counts. They agreed to pool their resources to count votes for key races in the 1964 election, an agreement that would last in some form for more than 50 years and eventually expand to polling voters on Election Day.

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

Counting of votes

When counting votes, the AP does not actually tabulate the results of individual voters’ actual ballots. This work is performed by the local election officials who administer elections in the United States.

Aside from establishing some general guidelines, the Constitution leaves the details of how elections are actually conducted to the states, meaning that there are 51 (not forgetting the District of Columbia) different sets of rules for conducting elections.