Here's How Associated Press Determines Who Won The Election

Summary

Summary of "Here's How Associated Press Determines Who Won The Election"
The NPR Politics Podcast

In the episode titled "Here's How Associated Press Determines Who Won The Election," hosted by Miles Parks and Domenico Montanaro, NPR delves into the intricate processes behind election night race calls. The episode features an in-depth conversation with David Scott, an executive at the Associated Press (AP) responsible for overseeing election operations, including vote counting and race declarations.

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Understanding AP's Race Calls

Race Calls vs. Projections

Miles Parks initiates the discussion by clarifying the distinction between race calls and projections. David Scott emphasizes that AP does not make projections but rather makes definitive declarations once they are certain a candidate has won a race.

David Scott [03:09]: "We're not making projections, we're making declarations based on the evidence this person has won."

AP's standard mandates 100% accuracy, ensuring that no race is called until it's unequivocally clear that trailing candidates cannot overcome the leader's vote count.

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The AP VoteCast Survey

Methodology and Distinction from Exit Polls

When asked about the AP VoteCast data, David Scott explains that it serves a role similar to exit polls but with significant differences. Unlike exit polls, which interview voters as they leave polling places—which has become less effective due to the rise in mail-in and early voting—VoteCast reaches voters through various channels until polls close.

David Scott [04:07]: "We are trying to reach voters as they are casting their ballots, be it in person, be it via mail, early in person."

The VoteCast survey targets approximately 120,000 individuals nationwide, with 3,000 to 4,000 respondents in battleground states like Pennsylvania. This extensive sample size allows AP to analyze the electorate with greater precision, breaking down demographic components into smaller segments such as Puerto Rican voters versus the broader Hispanic demographic.

David Scott [05:27]: "With a sample of 120,000, it dwarfs anything else that you might see in a pre-election context."

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Comparing Elections: 2020 and Beyond

Adapting to Changing Voting Methods

Reflecting on the 2020 election, David Scott highlights the unprecedented challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which necessitated changes in voting processes and campaign strategies. The pandemic led to a surge in mail-in voting and altered traditional campaigning methods, which AP had to adapt to meticulously.

David Scott [11:12]: "The candidates, they weren't even out campaigning in the way that they are today."

AP has since focused on increasing transparency in vote counting and race calling to rebuild public trust, especially in the wake of misinformation and distrust in media.

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Case Study: Arizona 2020

Lessons Learned from Close Races

Domenico Montanaro brings up the 2020 Arizona race, where AP called the state for Joe Biden amidst intense scrutiny and subsequent tightening of the vote margin. David Scott defends AP's methodology, explaining that their analysis accounted for all possible scenarios where trailing candidates could catch up, ultimately proving accurate.

David Scott [14:37]: "Our analysis concluded that if that happened for Donald Trump, he couldn't catch up. He would fall about 10,000 votes short of Joe Biden in Arizona."

This experience underscores AP's commitment to accuracy over speed, ensuring that race calls withstand the test of time and verification.

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Guidance for Voters During Election Night

Promoting Patience and Understanding

Domenico Montanaro offers advice to listeners on navigating election night results. He emphasizes the importance of patience, understanding demographic voting patterns, and recognizing that early leads do not always translate to final outcomes.

Domenico Montanaro [15:43]: "Take a step back, take a breath and be prepared for the fact that it could go on sometime."

This guidance aims to mitigate the anxiety and misinformation that often accompany closely contested elections.

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Media Trust and AP's Role

Maintaining Credibility in a Distrustful Environment

Miles Parks challenges AP's role in race calling amid declining media trust. David Scott responds by highlighting AP's nonpartisan stance and its essential function in providing timely, accurate election information to the public.

David Scott [17:20]: "Our system of democracy is decentralized... without the Associated Press doing this work of counting the vote, we wouldn't have a source, an unbiased source of information on election night."

AP's comprehensive approach, combining high-tech data scraping with a vast network of vote count reporters, ensures that the information disseminated is both accurate and reliable.

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The Scale of AP's Election Coverage

Combining Technology and Human Effort

David Scott elaborates on the logistical enormity of AP's election coverage, which involves over 5,000 individuals. This includes 4,000 vote count reporters across various precincts and 800 personnel dedicated to data intake and quality control.

David Scott [18:38]: "It's thousands of people, more than 5,000 people. We call it the single biggest act of journalism there is."

This dual approach of automated data collection and on-the-ground reporting ensures comprehensive and accurate vote tallying.

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Handling Pressure During Elections

Emphasizing Responsibility Over Stress

When asked about the pressure AP faces during elections, David Scott asserts that the team views their role as a responsibility rather than a source of stress. The focus remains on accurately reflecting the voters' decisions through meticulous data analysis.

David Scott [20:06]: "We honor the responsibility that we have. It's really just a big, simple math problem. Who got the most votes? Let's add them up and see who won."

This steadfast dedication ensures that AP remains a trusted source of election information, regardless of the political climate.

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Conclusion

The episode provides listeners with a comprehensive understanding of how the Associated Press meticulously determines election winners. By combining extensive data collection, advanced survey techniques, and a commitment to absolute accuracy, AP ensures reliable and timely race calls. The discussion also highlights the importance of media credibility and the role of transparent journalism in maintaining public trust during elections.

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Notable Quotes:

• David Scott [03:09]: "We're not making projections, we're making declarations based on the evidence this person has won."

• David Scott [04:07]: "We are trying to reach voters as they are casting their ballots, be it in person, be it via mail, early in person."

• Domenico Montanaro [15:43]: "Take a step back, take a breath and be prepared for the fact that it could go on sometime."

• David Scott [17:20]: "Our system of democracy is decentralized... without the Associated Press doing this work of counting the vote, we wouldn't have a source, an unbiased source of information on election night."

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This detailed summary encapsulates the key discussions and insights from the podcast episode, providing listeners with a clear understanding of AP's election night procedures and the broader implications for media trust and election integrity.

Transcript

[Miles Parks]

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[Miles Parks]

Hey, it's Miles. Real quick before the show. It has been a wild, exciting, oftentimes exhausting election season. And here in the homestretch, we want you to know about a few other ways you can keep up with everything happening each day. First, there's NPR's Morning News podcast, Up First. That show is recorded before dawn and out by 7:00am Eastern time each weekday. Often, you'll hear one of us from this show on that show. It's the morning news podcast that catches all of the news that happened overnight. Up First Second. Later in the day, you can find a new episode of Consider this. That's the podcast where NPR covers one big story in depth each weekday evening. They'll be all over this election and its aftermath as well. And of course, we will be here with you pretty much anytime there's big news with the context and analysis you need to understand it. So up first in the morning, consider this in the evening and the NPR Politics podcast every weekday. And anytime there's something big happening. This is your Election News Survival kit from NPR Podcasts. Okay, thanks for listening, and here's the show. Hi, this is Joseph from San Antonio. I'm getting ready to vote early on Halloween. This podcast was recorded at 1:34pm on Halloween, 2024. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I will have cast my ballot in my Batman costume. Okay. Enjoy the show.

[Domenico Montanaro]

There's some kind of joke about, like, voter ID or. Oh, see, I was gonna say, like, scariness.

[Miles Parks]

You're a superhero of democracy.

[Domenico Montanaro]

There you go. I always feel better when I come out of the ballot booth, so let's hope that's the.

[Miles Parks]

Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting.

[Domenico Montanaro]

I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.

[Miles Parks]

And David Scott from the Associated Press is here with us. Hi, David.

[David Scott]

Hey, guys.

[Miles Parks]

Great to have you here. David. NPR relies on the AP for race calls, which means that's you and your team. And I think, honestly, it would be really helpful and kind of important for the listeners and for us to talk a little bit about how you guys do that on election night. So I'm hoping we could just start with tell us a little bit about what your job is at the ap.

[David Scott]

Sure. I'm Sort of the executive at AP who oversees our election operations in terms of our vote count, our decision team where we declare winners, sort of everything that goes into the mechanics of elections and election night.

[Miles Parks]

And so for us, for our purposes, when anyone goes to npr.org and they see one of those little checkmarks that says this person has one Kentucky or this person has one Wyoming, that is coming from your guys team over there. And I guess, yeah, it's David's fault. Yeah, David's. Not us. The big button. Right. But tell us a little bit more about that. So race calls are different than projections, right? I mean, this is. You guys are completely certain when you make a call on a race that that person has won. Right.

[David Scott]

That's the way we describe it. Right. That we're not making projections, we're making declarations. And it's a little bit of a rhetorical device to remind us the standard that we hold at AP when we declare a winner. We are not saying someone has won a race until we are convinced, we are absolutely certain that the trailing candidates can't catch up to the leader. And so we're looking at data, we're looking at our voter survey, AP, VoteCast, we're looking at the history of a state, we're looking at the advanced vote data, we're really looking at the votes as they are coming in, as they've been counted and reported by election officials. But that's that standard. We hold ourselves to 100% accuracy. And so we say that we're not making projections. We are saying based on the evidence this person has won.

[Miles Parks]

Talk a little bit more about the AP vote cast data that you guys are using. So this is. Am I correct in thinking this is kind of like an exit poll that you guys are kind of getting data from all over the country in terms of how people are feeling about the electorate or what exactly is that?

[David Scott]

Yeah, it's kind of like an exit poll, but in a really important distinction way it's not, which is that we're not relying on interviewing voters as they exit a polling place. AP stopped working with the group that does the exit poll after the 2016 election for a really important reason. Most Americans don't vote in person at a polling place on election day anymore. So if most of the people you're trying to survey aren't available, if you're standing outside a polling place waiting to interview them, we thought that wasn't the right methodology moving forward. So we developed with our partners at Newark, at the University of Chicago, AP VoteCast, which is our version of an election survey. We are trying to reach voters as they are casting their ballots, be it in person, be it via mail, early in person. We're in the field for a week before election Day, right up until the moment polls close. And we're trying to meet voters where they are by text message, by phone, by mail, any way that we can contact them to try to get a sense of what's happening in the electorate as people are casting their ballots.

[Domenico Montanaro]

And the thing about those surveys is they're much bigger than the normal kinds of polls that you see in pre election polling. I mean, in a state you might get four to 800 people would be a normal size that you would get. How many people do you usually have in, let's say a state like Pennsylvania? Maybe 3,4000.

[David Scott]

I have no idea why you would pick Pennsylvania for this example. Yeah, 4,000. And so when you roll up all of what we're doing, we're targeting about 120,000 people nationwide with our VOT. So in those battleground states, three to 4,000 people that we're trying to talk to. So it's five to 10 times the size of a normal pre election survey. And then on a national level, with a sample of 120,000, it dwarfs anything else that you might see in a pre election context. And it's really important that we do that for a couple of reasons. The biggest one is that it allows us to examine the electorate in ways that you can't do with a normal survey. So for example, we might want to know this year what Puerto Rican voters thought about some things in the election as opposed to just Hispanic voters. And with a normal survey, your sample size isn't large enough to break demographic components down into those smaller pieces. And that's something that we can do with VoteCast.

[Domenico Montanaro]

And that would be because the margin of error would be way too high in something like a national poll to be able to break out those subgroups.

[David Scott]

Right, exactly right. You're just not getting the level of precision that you would need. The other thing that we do with VoteCast that we're really proud of is we just don't do the battleground states. Right. We will have survey data from every state in the union. And it's important to us at AP that that's the case. Every vote matters. Every person who's casting a ballot, their opinion, they're part of the electorate and they're part of the country. And so we want to be able to examine the whole of the electorate, not Just the electorate in a place like, let's say, Pennsylvania, that might ultimately be determinative on the road to 270.

[Miles Parks]

Well, I feel like people have been listening to this podcast for a couple minutes and we still have not yet asked David the big question on everyone's mind, which is when are we going to know who won?

[David Scott]

David, it's a great question and I only need to go talk to those 120,000 people and then listen to 160 million Americans cast their ballots before I can tell you. Here's what I'll say. It is amazing.

[Miles Parks]

That's really nicely.

[David Scott]

I know you did. I'm trying to help here. It is truly remarkable to me that as we sit here on this day, Halloween, we are looking at a race that looks so, so close. The seven states that we think are going to matter, they all appear to be about even what you're seeing with pre election polls. Everything's within the margin of error. So it's really a coin flip. There's so many factors that are going to go into that race that will be determinative. But if you look back to 2000, when AP didn't call that race that year, we've called it a couple of times at 11 o'clock when the big states on the west coast close. We've called it a couple of times on Wednesday morning either very early Wednesday morning when Donald Trump won in 2016, a little bit later on Wednesday when George Bush beat John Kerry. And then the last election it took until Saturday. So what I've been telling people, not a satisfying answer. I know. Sometime next week.

[Domenico Montanaro]

Yeah, that's likely. It's funny you mentioned polls close at 11 o'clock on the west coast and you'll call it right as a poll closes. I think for a lot of people, and I've written about this other times before, but maybe you can explain for people why the AP can call a state like California with 0% in. And then you'll see the AP has made a call.

[David Scott]

Yeah, and I don't know that we'll do that this year. We'll have to see what the data looks like, what we're able to do. If we look at a state that has a very long history of voting for one party or another, and we look at the advance vote data and we look at the registration data and we look at results from VoteCast, our survey of the electorate. And if all of those things point to a candidate winning with an enormous advantage, let's just say hypothetically, Wyoming and Donald Trump, he's very likely to win there with a significant advantage, you know, 20, 30 points. That's a race that we can call when polls close. Although I'll be honest with you, I would expect less of that this year just because of the nature of the race and how close it is.

[Domenico Montanaro]

Yeah.

[David Scott]

All right.

[Miles Parks]

Let's take a quick break and more on all of this when we get back.

[Domenico Montanaro]

This is Ira Glass of this American Life. Each week on our show, we choose a theme, tell different stories on that theme. All right. I'm just going to stop right there. You're listening to an NPR podcast. Chances are you know our show. So instead I'm going to tell you we've just been on a run of really good shows lately, some big, epic, emotional stories and some weird, funny stuff, too. Download us this American Life. Okay. So does this sound like you, you love NPR's podcasts. You wish you could get more of all your favorite shows and you want to support NPR's mission to create a more informed public. If all that sounds appealing, then it is time to sign up for the NPR plus bundle. Learn more at plus.NPR.org if you need a moment to catch your breath and calm your nerves, listen to the latest All Songs Considered from NPR Music. We've got an all new mix of songs to slow the blood and recalibrate your day. Plus reflections on gratitude, joy and the power of kindness. Listen to new episodes of All Songs CONSIDERED every Tuesday, wherever you get podcasts.

[Miles Parks]

And we're back with the Associated Press's David Scott. And David, I'm hoping you can talk a little bit about how this election compares to 2020 when it comes to your processes. I think when I talk to election officials, it's becoming clearer and clearer that 2020 looks like an outlier election in a bunch of different ways. I'm wondering how all of the changes to our how people actually vote impact your guys ability to make race calls.

[David Scott]

Four years ago, so different. I mean, we were in the middle of a pandemic. I mean, I was looking at some pictures from our election night coverage just the other day and we were all wearing masks and face shields. And so think about how much of the moment that we were in as a country as we were trying to conduct an election that year. I mean, the candidates, they weren't even out campaigning in the way that they are today. Some states have totally changed how their votes are cast and what their system of voting is. New Jersey went to an all male election in 2020 and they've since reverted back to a multimode election system like they had prior to the pandemic. So I think the biggest thing that we've done compared to four years ago, is to try to build on what we started then, which is to be so much more transparent about what goes into our vote count and what goes into our race calls. When I started doing this work, you know, an AP race call was a headline. It was. And that was enough. And our audience sort of accepted our headline. And now our audience, your audience, the public at large, they want to know more information. They want to know about the mechanics of voting. They want to know how the process works. There's a level of distrust that's been fostered by misinformation and deliberate bad actors. But there's this hunger for information about what goes into the process of voting and what goes into a race call or why someone has won. And so we've just had to restructure our news report so that our race calls don't have to be trusted, but they can be accepted as facts. Because we've shown our work, we've shown the data, we've shown the information that has yielded why our analysis has determined that this is the winner.

[Domenico Montanaro]

One of the things, you know, obviously people look at is when the people who make calls get it wrong or it gets close.

[David Scott]

Right.

[Domenico Montanaro]

I mean, we had congressional hearings after the 2000 election. How much does something like that, the experience of 2016, the experience of 2020, sort of shape what you guys do? Because a lot of the other networks say that they make projections that often means that they're faster than you guys in making a determination on who they think has won. And maybe you can talk a little bit about why that might be the case and what you guys have learned from the last couple of elections in patience.

[David Scott]

Well, it comes back to what I was saying earlier about our standard being 100% in the primaries, we got two race calls wrong. Both were state legislative races. One was because election officials reported the wrong results. And that one that we got wrong based on our analysis, it still gnaws at me like we really hold ourselves to that standard, that we expect our race calls to be 100% accurate. We do think about, you know, being swift. And the reason for that is we think misinformation flows into a vacuum. And so if we've not called a race, gives an opportunity for bad actors to say, well, why hasn't AP done this? And so we want to be calling winners and declaring winners as soon as we're able to do so, but never at the compromise of accuracy, never at the compromise of making sure that those trailing candidates don't have a path to victory.

[Domenico Montanaro]

You guys came under attack in 2020 because you made a quicker call for Arizona for Biden, and the race got tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter. And we all watched and we were wondering, is this going to flip the other direction? It didn't wind up doing that, but maybe you can just talk about Arizona for a minute and what you learned from that, especially how close this election seems like it might be.

[David Scott]

You know, what we try to do when we're looking at whether the trailing candidates can catch up is to give them every benefit of the doubt. If everything broke their way and the votes left to count, would they have the ability to catch up? And in that year, our analysis concluded that if that happened for Donald Trump, he couldn't catch up. He would fall about 10,000 votes short of Joe Biden in Arizona, and everything broke his way in the days after Election Day, and he lost by 10,000 votes. So we're actually, in some ways, really proud of that analysis because it held up. It showed that the work that we were doing yielded the correct race call. I will tell you, though, that we have spent more time probably looking at that race call than any others to make sure that we're never missing an opportunity to find a data point. We're never missing an opportunity to analyze data in a new way to make sure that we remain holding to our standard of 100% accuracy.

[Miles Parks]

Domenico, can I ask you, NPR uses the AP race calls in our coverage. You're going to be on the air a lot next week explaining to voters how they should be watching election results. Do you have any advice you can kind of pass along?

[Domenico Montanaro]

Well, I mean, I think David hinted at the idea of patience and really trying to get out front to explain to people what is going to be likely to happen so that they understand that just because you see the trend in one direction for one candidate doesn't necessarily mean that that's what's going to happen to explain to people that we're not likely to get a result on election night itself. So, you know, watching these states, looking at where the results are coming in, but also understanding what's left and having some patience to understand that things can change. I mean, you know, just because you see a big early vote lead, for example, for Democrats, doesn't mean that the Democrats are going to win by a lot because Republicans vote so overwhelmingly on Election Day. And just because that changes doesn't mean that it might not change more because mail voting comes in after that. And that might mean in the past Democrats have done better on some of those mail votes. And that has seen a change, especially in races this close. Take a step back, take a breath and be prepared for the fact that it's, it could go on sometime.

[Miles Parks]

David, just to take a devil's advocate perspective here for just one second, I want you to kind of explain to people who look at the idea of media outlets at all calling races and just say, why don't you get out of this business? You know, media trust in media. Right now we all hear about a headline every single day, that it's at an all time low. Why do you feel like it's still important to be in the business of calling races as opposed to just letting election officials spend their days and weeks counting votes and then releasing the kind of certified results at the end of that process?

[David Scott]

Well, I think a couple of things. First, I'll say when we're counting the vote, what we're doing is reporting back to voters decisions that really they've already made. Right. Those facts, those vote counts are their votes. And we think it's important that they have a trusted source, a nonpartisan source like the Associated Press to get that information as soon as it's available. Our system of democracy is decentralized. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, they weren't thinking about 300 years into the future where we are today. And a presidential election in the United States is really a series of elections contested at the local level at thousands of counties and towns and cities in New England, parishes in Louisiana. And if it wasn't for the Associated Press doing this work of counting the vote, we wouldn't have a source, an unbiased source of information on election night and in the days after about what all those vote totals were. We would literally have to wait until the end of the process in January when those electoral college votes are open.

[Domenico Montanaro]

To take a step back just to think about the breadth of what the AP does. David, maybe you can just sort of shed a little bit of light on how you guys gather vote data from different precincts. And how many people do you have going out and doing that?

[David Scott]

Yeah, it is an effort that is both high tech where we are taking in data programmatically from counties and states that offer it that way. We're scraping websites, so we're writing code that pulls the data from the websites of counties and towns as they are posted. But it's also a manual process. We will have 4,000 what we call vote count reporters in county and city and town and parish election offices next Tuesday. And they will be there to literally get from election officials the votes as they are counted. Those reports in real time. They call them into ap. We still use the phone. We like that better than an app because there's no fat finger mistakes. And we're able to quality control check that data. 800 people will be taking in those calls. We'll be looking at data. We'll be doing quality control checks. We look at multiple sources. So what do the, what do the results from those vote count reporters say versus what's posted on the website? If there's a discrepancy, we go back to the election officials and say, hey, these numbers don't match up. What are the real numbers? And we do that for weeks on end until we get to the point where all the vote is certified. But it is thousands of people, more than 5,000 people. We call it the single biggest act of journalism there is.

[Miles Parks]

Well, it does bring up kind of a final point. I was curious about, David, like everyone, I spend my days talking to everyone involved in elections, and it feels like everyone involved in elections is feeling a lot of pressure right now. Are you feeling that pressure? I mean, now a few days away from Tuesday?

[David Scott]

I don't like to say that we feel pressure here. We honor the responsibility that we have. I mean, the way that the country's democracy has evolved back from those days and when the founders wrote the Constitution and us getting into this business of counting the vote and declaring winners, literally two years after the AP was founded in 1848 to today. We honor the responsibility that we have. It's really important for us, regardless of who wins, because it's not about us. And as I like to say, once polls close, it's no longer about the candidates, it's about what the voters have decided. And it's really just a big, simple math problem. Who got the most votes? Let's add them up and see who won.

[Miles Parks]

The AP's David Scott. Thank you so much for joining us.

[David Scott]

Glad to be here, guys.

[Miles Parks]

I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting.

[Domenico Montanaro]

I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.

[Miles Parks]

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics podcast.

[Domenico Montanaro]

The Code Switch team spent Election Day talking to folks about how the outcome might impact them. It's a time capsule of people's hopes and fears before they knew the results.

[David Scott]

One way or another, there's a change coming. I wanted to vote for Trump, but I voted for her.

[Domenico Montanaro]

Gays for Trump. I cried this morning. I've been crying on and off. I'm terrified. Listen to Code Switch, the podcast about race and identity from npr.

[David Scott]

These days, it can feel like the news is fighting for your attention wherever you turn. But staying informed shouldn't be a battle. Everything you need to navigate the stories that matter to you is at your fingertips. The NPR app cuts through the noise, bringing you local, national and global coverage. No paywalls, no profits, no nonsense. Download the NPR app in your App Store today. Or you can go to npr.org app.