How News Organizations Call Winners on Election Night

On election night, news organizations across the United States announce winners in races long before every vote has been counted. This happens during midterm elections, when voters choose members of Congress and other leaders. To make these calls, TV networks and news websites use vote counts, computer models, and teams of experts. Two main companies — the Associated Press (AP) and Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ) — help most news outlets do this important job.

The AP has been counting votes in US elections since 1848. It works with more than 4,000 reporters placed at local polling locations and county election offices around the country. These reporters gather vote totals and send them to the decision desks at major TV networks like ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, and NBC. The AP only calls a race a winner when it is sure the person in second place has no way to catch up.

Decision Desk HQ, also called DDHQ, works differently. It uses computer software to check official state election websites over and over, collecting new vote totals as they are posted. About 80% of its vote data comes straight from official government websites, while reporters on the ground collect the rest. Before DDHQ can declare a winner, every member of the team must agree, and the head of data science must sign off.

Some news outlets make their own calls instead of simply copying from the AP or DDHQ. Fox News uses the AP's vote count but adds its own analysis to decide when to call a race. The New York Times also reviews close races on its own, using neighborhood-level data and a special tool called the Needle model. Other outlets, like Bloomberg and Reuters, do not make their own calls at all — they wait for other organizations to do it first.

The first election calls of the night happen as soon as polls start to close. In Indiana and Kentucky, polls close at 6 p.m. Eastern Time, and calls can come quickly after that. States like Georgia, South Carolina, Vermont, and Virginia follow at 7 p.m. If most people in a race voted early, a winner might be called almost instantly.

Sometimes a news organization makes a mistake and has to take back a call. These take-backs, called retractions, are rare but do happen. DDHQ once withdrew a call in a Seattle mayor's race, and in 2018 the AP had to retract a call in a California congressional race after the vote count shifted. Both the AP and DDHQ say they work very hard to avoid these errors.

Not everyone trusts news organizations to get election results right. A poll found that more than 60% of Americans have some confidence in news outlets reporting accurate results, but only 32% have high confidence. Democrats tend to trust news organizations more than Republicans do. This lack of trust makes the job of calling races even more important to get right.