Before, on and after Election Day, thousands of Americans, many of them volunteers, will gather, process and count ballots for president and for national, state and local offices. That collective effort is the wizard behind the curtain of a core function of U.S. democracy — picking elected leaders.
Similarly, news outlets call elections based on a combined effort involving statistical analysis, vote counts, surveys, exit polls and old-fashioned reporting. With varying rules and processes for how states conduct elections and tens of millions of advance ballots expected to be cast due to the COVID-19 pandemic, major news companies like ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, NBC and The Associated Press are telling their audiences not to expect clear-cut results on election night.
Eventually, however, the national media will call or project winners for thousands of races across the country.
Here’s how they’ll do it.
Exit polls, surveys and ballot types
Decision desk staff at the AP and national TV news networks work separately but use similar methods to call elections, as Sam Feist, CNN’s Washington bureau chief and senior vice president explained during an Oct. 14 briefing hosted by PEN America. For the 2020 general election it won’t be a race among the news outlets to, say, be the first to call a state for a presidential candidate: “I can assure you — I can speak on behalf of CNN, but I suspect I’m speaking on behalf of others that we are not competing with each other. The numbers are going to dictate when we make a projection,” Feist said.
ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC are part of the National Election Pool, which delivers exit polls conducted by Edison Research to those organizations. Exit pollsters use written questionnaires at voting sites to find out which candidates voters selected. During the 2016 general election, Edison polled 85,000 people at 1,000 locations nationwide and conducted phone surveys with 16,000 advance voters.
The AP and Fox News left the National Election Pool after 2016. To replace traditional exit polling, those outlets partnered to develop a proprietary survey along with NORC, formerly known as the National Opinion Research Center, at the University of Chicago. The method surveys thousands of randomly selected voters in the days leading up to an election and combines that information with poll results from online panels to get a sense of who voters are and which candidates they’re leaning toward. During the 2018 elections, for example, the AP conducted 139,000 interviews with registered voters in every state.
The AP also doesn’t project outcomes — it calls elections.
“When we declare a winner, it’s our final word,” AP Deputy Managing Editor for Operations David Scott said during a Sept. 23 briefing hosted by the American Press Institute. “We don’t make projections at the Associated Press. We don’t make predictions. There are no apparent winners or likely winners when we make a race call.”
The AP will declare winners in more than 7,000 races around the country after Election Day. The standard is simple: If there is a path to victory for only one candidate, the AP calls the race for that candidate. Its call on the presidential race will take into account on-the-ground reporting — roughly 5,000 AP reporters will fan out across the country and feed information to a core team of 60 analysts — in addition to statistical modeling, pre-election polling, voting history in polling districts, vote counts and votes left to be counted.
At least 61 million advance ballots have been cast for the 2020 general election so far, according to the U.S. Elections Project led by University of Florida political science professor Michael McDonald. Advance ballots include mail-in and absentee ballots and early in-person voting. Roughly 140 million Americans cast votes during the 2016 general election and 41% of them voted before Election Day, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, a federal clearinghouse of state-by-state voting information. Of those who voted early in 2016, 17% voted in-person at polling sites while 24% mailed their ballots.
Exit polls may be less predictive this year, as decision desk editors at major media outlets estimate between 50% and 60% of ballots will be cast before Nov. 3. Decision desk editors also expect overall turnout to be higher than in 2016. It’s unclear whether those additional voters will show up in the advance voting numbers or whether Election Day turnout will also be higher, as CNN Politics Polling Director Jennifer Agiesta noted during the PEN America briefing.
It’s also a near certainty that hundreds of thousands of votes will come in after Nov. 3 in the form of provisional ballots and mail ballots that arrive after Election Day in states where that’s allowed.