Millions will watch and listen election night as results pour in and news outlets call races for winning candidates and ballot measures. But how do those calls get made?
St. Louis Public Radio and NPR are among the thousands of news organizations that look to The Associated Press for race calls. The AP has been declaring election winners for more than 170 years and will do it again for the presidential race and roughly 7,000 state and local elections across the U.S. and up and down the ballot Tuesday.
STLPR will have live election results trackers on our site Tuesday evening with the national tally for the presidency and balance of power in Congress and the Senate. We’ll also have live results for top contests in Missouri and Illinois. These trackers, designed by NPR, will run on data provided by the AP. As votes are tallied into the evening, checkmarks will appear next to candidate names, signaling the AP has declared a winner.
Some races may take days or even weeks to decide. In the 2020 presidential election, the AP declared Joe Biden the winner four days after Election Day.
How the AP makes race calls
The AP only declares a winner when it determines that a trailing candidate has no path to victory. It does not make race projections or name likely winners.
Race callers at the AP work with the agency’s political and governmental reporters to understand local election rules, recount requirements, and how counties and congressional districts have voted historically. The AP reviews past results for trends of voting by mail and early in-person voting as well as how the state has historically counted votes — how many are counted after polls close and how many are counted in the days after.
The AP’s Decision Team reviews vote tallies as they come in, focusing on key questions like how many ballots remain uncounted and from which areas. For example, if a candidate has a strong lead but there are many uncounted ballots from areas that historically favor an opponent, the AP may wait to declare a winner. The agency also uses a comprehensive survey of voter behavior — called VoteCast — to gauge overall trends, including early voting and demographic patterns.
What if a candidate concedes?
STLPR may report on a candidate declaring victory or making a concession speech as a newsworthy moment, but that is not the same as the race being called. Candidates have occasionally been known to proclaim victory or defeat only to retract what they said after a new batch of voting precincts drop results. If STLPR does report on a race before the AP declares a winner, we will make clear that the race has not been called and cite the percentage of precincts reporting at the time of publication.
Could there be races called as soon as polls close?
Yes. Not all races are close. In some states and congressional districts, a political party’s history of consistent wins by wide margins and corresponding trends reflected in AP VoteCast make a race eligible to be declared as soon as polls close, the AP wrote earlier this month.
What about local races?
The AP will be making calls for most of the contests STLPR is following on election night, but there are some local races and ballot initiatives that the news agency isn’t watching. In those cases, STLPR will wait until all voting precincts have reported results or until the winner is a mathematical certainty — say, a candidate’s lead is by more than 20,000 votes, but there are still 10,000 ballots uncounted.
