Why and how the AP counts votes for thousands of US elections

WASHINGTON (AP) — There’s no easier way to count votes than to count votes.

The Associated Press has tallied the results of national, state and local elections since 1848. In general terms, the process is the same today as it was then: Ballot counting reporters collect local election results as soon as the polls close, then send those results to for the PA to collate, verify and report.

This year, the AP will count votes in about 5,000 contested races across the United States, from presidential and congressional to state legislatures and ballot measures.

The US does not have a national body that collects and publishes election results. Elections are administered locally by thousands of offices, following standards set by states. In many cases, states themselves do not even provide up-to-date tracking of election results.

PA plays a role in the collection and standardization of results.

The AP vote count fills a gap by bringing together information that might not otherwise be available online for days or weeks after an election, or scattered across hundreds of local websites. With no national standards or consistent expectations across states, it also ensures that data is in a standard format, uses standard terms, and is subject to rigorous quality control.

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Data collection efforts begin when Americans start voting, which in almost every race means well before Nov. 5 of this year.

AP requests information from state and local election administrators about the number of absentee ballots requested and the number of early votes cast as soon as voting begins. (You can track those numbers Here.) These figures do not contain results, which are not released until after the polls close, but can provide valuable information about who voted up until election day.

The big effort begins as the polls close, when about 4,000 AP reporters spread out to polling places and election offices across the county. An AP vote count reporter will be stationed at nearly every election office in the county on Election Day, as well as in key towns and cities, collecting data directly from the source.

Many vote count reporters have a substantial amount of experience collecting accurate vote count information for the PA. At the most recent general election, about half of them had worked for the PA for at least 10 years. Hundreds more have experience collecting primary and general election vote count data.

They work with local election officials to collect results directly from the counties or precincts where they are first counted and collected and transmit them, by phone or electronically, as soon as they are available. The results are sent to the AP voting center, which has another 800 to 900 employees.

Because many states and counties post election results on websites, the AP monitors those sites and enters the results into the same system. The Vote Entry Center also takes result feeds directly from election officials where they are provided and uses automated tools to collect results from official government websites.

In many cases, counties will report multiple votes as they count ballots throughout the night. The AP continuously updates its number as these results are published. During the general election, AP will do up to 21,000 race updates per hour.

Mistakes can occur, such as test data being accidentally published on a state’s website, or a stringer accidentally transposing two candidates’ vote totals. Having multiple sources helps the PA discover where these mistakes are happening and often prevents them from being published.

Sometimes counting errors need to be corrected, such as when a county made a correction to its data or someone accidentally entered an extra zero. In some cases, this may result in a decrease in the total number of votes counted when the problem is identified and fixed.

This is why it helps to have multiple sources of updates.

On general election nights, the AP may have up to five or six potential sources of election results in each county and choose between them based on which is the most up-to-date and accurate. These multiple sources do not merely serve as a backup for each other; it also provides a check to ensure that the reported vote totals are correct.

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