Associated Press has become the ‘go to’ place to learn election results….
The Washington Post does piece on their operation…
This year, the news service will call 6,823 winners — assuming no races go to runoffs — including winners in every statewide, House and state legislative race. It’s a massive endeavor, involving more than 5,000 people, and one that the AP internally refers to as “the single largest act of journalism that exists,” says Executive Editor Julie Pace.
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“It’s a huge responsibility. We know that when we call the race, it has to be right. There’s no other option,” Pace says. And it’s not just the presidential race. “We call races up and down the ballot, and they all have to be right because there is no other source of that race call in that time frame. That’s why we have stepped into this place.”
The AP says its accuracy rate for the past several general elections surpasses 99.9 percent. It never made a call in the 2000 presidential race between Al Gore and George W. Bush, when Florida’s incredibly close margin forced a recount that was eventually ended by the Supreme Court. The last erroneous call the AP made in a presidential contest occurred during the 2008 primaries, when it reversed its call that Hillary Clinton won Missouri over Barack Obama.
Every election, the AP refines its election-call operation. This year, it’s also publishing stories in advance with the kind of granular vote-count information that used to be circulated just within the AP and other newsrooms. It’s also preparing to push out text and video explainers as the count goes on during election night and beyond.
Thousands of news organizations rely on the AP for reporting who won, including NPR, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Univision, Google and Apple. Some, like The Washington Post, use the AP for the vast majority of races, but for select races also use data from other nonpartisan organizations, such as Edison Research, and their own election models. Many television news networks have their own decision desks that call or project winners using data from Edison or other firms….
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Through Election Day and beyond, the AP will deploy more than 4,000 freelancers to election offices around the country to track and tally counts in real time. They will call in those numbers to about 800 vote entry clerks, who crunch the numbers and check them for accuracy.
About 60 people on the decision team — which exists year-around, even in non-election years — analyze the reports and focus only on making calls. “This is a full-time team that is deep in the weeds of election law and has a real-time understanding of what’s happening and changing on the ground in these states,” says AP Washington bureau chief Anna Johnson….
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