How the AP calls races and what Nevadans can expect on election night

Nevadans wait eagerly for election results after the polls close, but it’s an extensive process for a winner to be called.

While official certified election results don’t come out until weeks after elections, the public turns to resources like the Associated Press to analyze the results and call races as early as possible.

The Associated Press has tracked vote tallies and declared winners since 1848. In the November 2024 election, it will track 5,000 contested races up and down the ballot, from presidential to state legislative races, across the country.

Here’s how the news agency goes about calling races, according to its Washington Bureau Chief Anna Johnson.

She said when the AP calls a race, it is not a guess or a projection.

“We will make the race call when we are absolutely certain that there is no path forward for the trailing candidate to overtake the leading candidate,” Johnson said.

The AP has around 4,000 vote count reporters to staff county election offices around the country, Johnson said.

The vote count reporters, who have covered elections for years, get the results as they’re coming in and call those results in to the AP’s staff of several hundred vote clerks, Johnson said. They will get those results and double check them, triple check them and constantly watch for updates.

The AP also pulls data that comes in from other means, such as counties releasing their updated voter counts online, as a way of verifying the results coming from the vote count reporters.

“We’ll take that information — combined with our own reporting that we have in the field with the county with the election officials — we’ll take all that in, and we check this over and over and over to make sure that everything looks accurate about the vote result totals that are coming in,” Johnson said.

Then, race analysts examine the data. They consider the numbers of outstanding ballots yet to be counted, as well as voter registration, past elections and ever-changing election rules. When it becomes clear there’s no path forward for the trailing candidate to overtake the leading candidate, the race is called, Johnson said.

A board decision team made up of full-time experts who specialize in elections full time are charged with examining results from key races and consider the data, she said.

In Nevada, a statewide analyst for AP looks solely at the Silver State, while specialized House race analysts focus on congressional races. The board decision team will also look at the Senate race in Nevada and the presidential race, Johnson said.

“So it is a very robust process of AP that has a lot of safeguards and fail-safes to ensure that the data that we’re getting in and the data and how we’re analyzing it is accurate,” Johnson said.

Only on occasions has the AP gotten a race call wrong, and when it happened the AP corrected themselves immediately, Johnson said.

“We need to be as fast as possible in making our race calls, but accuracy is absolutely the gold standard,” she said.

In the 2024 primary season, Johnson thinks one or two race calls were inaccurate because of inaccurate data that had come in.

“We’ll correct it immediately and immediately alert our customers and others as to why it was wrong and how we got it wrong, and rectify it immediately,” Johnson said.

The AP has emphasized showing its work behind the race calls and being transparent about how it makes those determinations, she said.

When can Nevadans expect to see races being called? It depends, Johnson said.

“If a race is really tight, we’re just going to have to wait for more of the vote totals to come in before we’re able to call that race,” she said.

Contact Jessica Hill at jehill@reviewjournal.com. Follow @jess_hillyeah on X.