Inside the AP's process for calling election races

The Associated Press will supply the winner calls that PBS News relies on in the closely watched 2026 midterms, and David Scott, the AP's vice president of election services, explained to PBS News anchor Deema Zein how the organization decides when a contest is over. Scott said a winner is named only when AP is certain that no trailing candidate can overtake the leader. Speed is not the goal; accuracy comes first, according to PBS NewsHour.

The main evidence is the tally itself, weighed against how many ballots are still expected and where they are located. Analysts also consider early voting patterns, a state's past results, and AP's own polling of voters. The work is done by a team of journalists, data analysts and political scientists who study elections all year, with some focused on projecting total turnout and others on each candidate's running count.

Scott noted that AP has tallied votes and named winners since 1848, two years after the cooperative was founded. In this year's primaries, it called more than 11,000 races and made three errors. He said one stemmed from faulty information provided by election officials and another from a technical problem. He described such mistakes as rare.

Summarized by PolitiKool from PBS NewsHour’s reporting. Read the full story at PBS NewsHour →