Why media ‘calls’ US elections, what this means

The United States does not have an equivalent of the Election Commission of India. This means that the task of tabulating national results falls on the media. Here is how this works

In 2020, the AP declared Joe Biden the winner on November 7, four days after Election Day. (AP)

5 min readNew DelhiNov 4, 2024 07:54 AM IST First published on: Nov 2, 2024 at 06:05 PM IST

There is a longstanding tradition of news organisations “calling” elections in the United States. Beyond reporting leads and trends, multiple TV channels and news agencies make definitive claims about polls’ results — much before they are made official. The Associated Press has long been the gold standard for calling elections in the US.

Decentralised elections

The US will hold 51 distinct elections on Tuesday — one in every state, and one in the District of Columbia — each with its own set of rules and regulations, voting mechanisms, and corps of election workers. Unlike in India, there is no federal body to tabulate results, and provide a national picture.

This is because elections in the US are highly decentralised. Although there does exist a Federal Election Commission (FEC), this body’s role is restricted to enforcing election finance regulations. The FEC does not decide or enforce rules regarding the conduct of elections and counting.

Must Read | Who conducts US elections; how votes are cast and counted

This is left up to the states, and in many cases, even individual counties. Proponents of such a system argue that a federal body in charge of conducting elections and aggregating results would be highly susceptible to ill-intentioned executive interference, and open the door for manipulation.

However, such a decentralised system also makes the process of counting chaotic and fragmented, and holds up results, often for weeks.

How media calls polls

It is in this context that the American media calls elections, letting the public know the victor long before official results come out.

Also Read | How the United States’ electoral college works

The Associated Press called its first election in 1848, when it declared Zachary Taylor as the 12th US president. Since then, the agency has called every single presidential election, with near 100% accuracy. It also calls thousands of other races down the ballot, and also in the mid-term. In 2020, the AP declared winners in more than 5,000 contested races — from the race to the White House to every contested seat in every state legislature.

Today, the agency has a dedicated team for this mammoth task it refers to as “the world’s single largest act of journalism”. These race callers are employees or freelancers who are deeply familiar with the state they are in. The AP also employs vote counting clerks who scrape official feeds, and websites to make the raw data available for tabulation.

Prior to Election Day, the race callers study election rules to understand how the counting process will work, in addition to studying past trends in the counties they are in, latest opinion poll survey, and statistics on how in-person and mail-in ballots are likely to play out.

After polls close, these callers look at far more than just the incoming vote tallies. They analyse demographic data, data on the type of ballot cast and counted, how many ballots likely remain uncounted (and from where), and multiple such data points to come to a conclusion.

The AP says that it only declares a winner after the result is beyond doubt. According to the agency’s explainer on its race calling process, “All of this reporting and analysis is aimed at determining the answer to a single question: Can the trailing candidates catch the leader? Only when the answer is an unquestionable ‘no’ is the race ready to be called”.

Calling a presidential race is effectively a two-part process. First, is calling poll results in individual states. The very first state calls will be made on the night of the election or by the next morning. Based on these calls and the called states’ respective Electoral College allocation, the agency would then call the race to the White House. In 2020, the AP declared Joe Biden the winner four days after Election Day, on November 7.

For more on how the Electoral College works, click here.

‘Too close to call’

In its long history of calling presidential races, the AP has had to retract its call just once — in the tightly contested Al Gore vs George W Bush race in 2000. Based on Election Day polling, the AP and most news channels had called Florida for Gore. But as more votes were counted, Bush surged ahead. The AP retracted its original call, but held-off from making a second one because the race was “too close to call”. More than a month later, a 5-4 US Supreme Court decision stopped a recount, and locked in Bush’s narrow victory.

Also Read | Why swing states have outsize importance in US elections

Beginning in 2019, the AP formally introduced the practice of declaring some elections “too close to call”. This call is made if no clear winner emerges after the tabulation of all outstanding ballots (with some exceptions), that is, if the margin between the top two candidates is less than 0.5 percentage points.

In a presidential election, this is relevant to calling individual states, like Florida in 2000, where the margin was only in the hundreds. If the particular state is crucial to which way the election swings (as Florida was in 2000), the AP would hold off from declaring anyone president.