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You are here: Home / Past Elections / 2020 Elections / Election Watch Open Thread: Examining the Mechanics, with the AP

Election Watch Open Thread: Examining the Mechanics, with the AP

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If you want to look at election stories that are actually informative, the Associated Press has been doing this job for quite a long time, and they’re very professional. From Esquire:

… The Associated Press has called U.S. elections since 1848, when it used a new technology, the telegraph, to declare Zachary Taylor the next president of the United States. In our lifetime, Election Day has pretty much gone like this: visit your local polling place, vote, flip on the TV around prime time, and watch the returns come in. By the time you go to bed, the media has declared a winner. While cable networks have their own teams of experts who compile data and project winners, they rely on the AP’s reporting and data to cross-reference their work. And the AP supplies results to its subscribers, including The New York Times, Google, and myriad local newspapers. The general consensus is if the AP declares a winner, it must be true…

So, how is the Associated Press planning to call a winner in this historic election, to ensure it gets this one right despite the unprecedented hurdles, because getting it wrong could spill the country into chaos?…

The AP’s election-coverage operation is massive and complex, but here’s the simplest way to describe how it calls elections. An editorial team consisting of reporters, editors, and photographers produces stories about Election Day. A team of sixty analysts interprets data coming in from each state to declare winners in about seven thousand elections, from the White House to local races. And “a bridge” of editors, according to [Washington bureau chief] Pace, connects these two sides; she’s part of that team.

In addition to the people, there’s a machine component called VoteCast. This is basically the AP’s new version of exit polling—a way to ask 140,000 people, starting October 28 via phone and online surveys, if they voted, for whom they cast their ballot, and why. Until the invention of VoteCast in 2018, AP reporters asked people leaving their polling place for whom they voted. This year marks the first time VoteCast is being deployed in a presidential race. VoteCast is more effective than traditional exit polling for capturing early, mail-in, and absentee voters, making it a better tool for 2020, when more than half of the electorate is expected to vote before Election Day.

On November 3, the staff working with the AP’s VoteCast data will confine themselves to a so-called quarantine room, prohibited from sharing that information with anyone before 5:00 p.m. EST. (After the 1980 presidential election, media outlets struck a handshake agreement that they wouldn’t declare the winner in a state before its polls closed.) Once the VoteCast staff are free to roam the newsroom, the AP editorial team can start reporting on trends in that data, like the issues that were most important to voters. They won’t report on what VoteCast may be saying about Trump or Biden leading in any state…

Reader Interactions

34Comments

  5. 5.

    sdhays

    @Baud: I’m still in awe that polling seems to work at all anymore. I get so many junk calls on my mobile that I never answer calls from numbers that I don’t recognize anymore. In 2012, when we still had a landline, I screened all calls because 90% of them were Mitt Romney calling me up to beg for my vote (he didn’t get it).

    I don’t understand how they get a reasonable number of respondents anymore.

    ETA: Well, I gather that a lot of people are not like me, but I still have trouble understanding who these people are who just answer any random call nowadays.

  6. 6.

    piratedan

    @frosty: i would suggest MSNBC, sure you have Kornacki and Williams to snarl at, but you’ll likely have it anchored by Reid, Wallace and Maddow…. ’nuff said.

  8. 8.

    Kent

    So when is it time to turn on the TV and actually start seeing real results rolling in and not just talking heads?

    I too, am surprised that polling still works.  I never answer the phone from someone I don’t know and I mostly just delete emails from sources I don’t recognize.   I would be nearly impossible to reach.

  9. 9.

    James E Powell

    @frosty:

    Any suggestions on the best channel to watch the results come in tonight?

    Once it becomes clear that Biden is winning, I will turn on FOX.

  12. 12.

    Kent

    @James E Powell: The Karl Rove meltdown on live TV and Megyn Kelly marching down the hall with him to talk to the data folks was some comedy gold in 2012.

    But I’d rather see actual results and intelligent analysis.

  13. 13.

    gvg

    There are times when I answer unknown numbers, like when I am expecting a call back from a Dr’s office. Thise are rare though. I also block texts from strangers telling me about candidates and urging me to vote.  That’s the new thing and I don’t like it. I know it helps over all, but I dislike being solicited so much myself, I can’t bring myself to donate to such efforts.

    It does seem like the flyers and ads I have been unable to avoid have more blatant lies than they used to, a Trump affect IMO.

  15. 15.

    James E Powell

    @Kent:

    I watched them announce two Obama wins. It was more awesome the second time because of Rove’s meltdown, but it was also great because the FOX team had set things up like it was going to be a long night folks, this thing is going down to the wire, then when west coast polls closed – BANG! – it’s over.

  17. 17.

    gkoutnik

    Need recommendations (I should know this, but I don’t): No TV here in gk-land, but plenty of internets. Where will you be watching online this evening (other than here, which is already on the list), those who want to keep up in real time? Are any new services streaming? Best live-blogging? What do you like, and why? Thanks!

  18. 18.

    Madame Bupkis

    My mom was born 100 years ago today.  Her mom voted (for Eugene Debs!) on November 2nd 1920, and had her the next day.  Luckily, Jews don’t name after the living, or she’d have been Eugenia.  On the anniversary of women’s right to vote and my mom’s birthday…go Joe!

  20. 20.

    Woodrow/asim

    @Kent: So when is it time to turn on the TV and actually start seeing real results rolling in and not just talking heads?

    There’s no way to know that for sure, if this isn’t just a rhetorical question :)

    In modern elections you usually start to see the real shape of things as it closes in on 11PM ET, if not earlier.  Yet with all the COVID-driven changes to modern voting patterns + meddling it’s hard to say what this election’s estimation process will look like, esp. with states that don’t start counting until polls close.

    It’s entirely possible you’ll wake tomorrow, and we just won’t know. Frankly, my plan is to just disconnect around 7PM ET and see what things look  like when I wake for work, tomorrow. No sense raising my blood pressure over an outcome that I’ve worked to support w/time/money/voting, yet now must leave, for a moment, in other’s hands.

  23. 23.

    Ruckus

    @Baud:

    I like that we all can have a phone with us anywhere 24/7, and now we don’t answer calls. I remember when we had to call a long distance operator to call out of a city and a lot of the country didn’t have a phone. Now I’m back to that, I haven’t had a landline in over 15 years.

  24. 24.

    Ruckus

    One of the guys at work asked how soon will we know.  That is the 24 million dollar question today.

  25. 25.

    catclub

    @Kent: There was a prediction twitter thread that also gave times that things are likely to happen.  From WV and Kentucky being called 5  minutes after polls close – to California being called  a different 5 minutes  after polls close there.  I think around midnight eastern is when there will be a very good idea on florida.

  26. 26.

    Mary G

    I answered a few polls when I still had a landline. Most of them were push polls, but I had a real one in early 2016 on the presidential primaries. I gave Hillary a 10 and Twitler a zero, and the woman said are you sure, and I said “OK, negative 10,000 would be closer.

  29. 29.

    Roger Moore

    @Kent:

    So when is it time to turn on the TV and actually start seeing real results rolling in and not just talking heads?

    If you really want to watch the TV for that, you could always follow on-line and wait until the stuff they’re reporting on-line sounds like it’s getting definitive.

  32. 32.

    cmorenc

    @James E Powell:

    I watched them announce two Obama wins. It was more awesome the second time because of Rove’s meltdown

    For pure shadenfreude  entertainment, the Rove meltdown was the most awesome, but the overall monumental significance of a black man, especially of such worthy talent, winning in 2008 was by far the most awesome political event of my lifetime.

  33. 33.

    Betsy

    I seem to remember another  “handshake agreement” that came about in 2000, when certain news outlets were calling Florida, while California and other western states were still voting.  A lot of sound and fury about how outrageous it was to do that while voters were still in line, and so on.

    Flash forward 16 years, nothing had changed.

    When “94% of precincts are reporting” it doesn’t mean anything, necessarily.  Precincts in some areas have challenges getting results in and that’s strongly correlated in many states with socio-economic characteristics, rural or suburban or urban setting, transportation challenges of the area, and other considerations that are also strongly linked to voting preferences.  National media outlets often don’t know these local differences very well and things can shift.

    It’s fine to report on numbers as they’re available (AFTER, OF COURSE, EVERY VOTER IN THE NATION IS DONE VOTING) — but I really wish they would call the results when the Elections Boards do, and not before.

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