How Are Election Races Called? The AP Counts With 4,000 Reporters, and a Race Is Called Only When the Trailing Candidate Cannot Catch Up
On Tuesday night, long before every vote is counted, the calls will start — Reuters explains the machinery behind them, from the AP's 4,000 reporters in county offices to the unanimous sign-off a final projection requires.
WEST PALM BEACH — When polls start closing Tuesday night, the winners viewers see projected on their screens will not come from the candidates or the counties alone. Reuters, in an explainer published Sunday, laid out how United States news organizations will make their midterm race calls: most television networks and digital outlets rely on one of two vote-count providers, the Associated Press or the election-data firm Decision Desk HQ.
The AP's operation is the larger and older of the two. The nonprofit newsroom has counted votes in every United States election since 1848, Reuters reported, and for the 2026 midterms it will deploy more than 4,000 reporters at county election offices and local polling locations, gathering and providing data to the decision desks at ABC News, CBS News, Fox, CNN and NBC News. Some outlets, including the Wall Street Journal and MS NOW, will rely solely on the AP for race calls, while Fox News and CBS News will make their own projections based on the AP vote count, exit polls, early-vote totals and their own statistical modeling; the New York Times relies on AP calls for most contests but independently reviews competitive races.
The first calls, Reuters reported, will start soon after polls begin to close — first in Indiana and Kentucky at 6 p.m. Eastern, and shortly after in Georgia, South Carolina, Vermont and Virginia at 7 p.m. Eastern, the hour Florida's polls close as well. The AP calls a race only when the trailing candidate cannot catch up: it uses reported vote totals and estimates how many votes remain uncounted from past voting patterns and early-vote data, and final projections require unanimous agreement from its team and a sign-off from its head of data science, Scott Tranter, who told Reuters the agency is preparing to have several thousand people working on election night to gather data. In Palm Beach County, polls run 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday at each voter's assigned precinct, the county Supervisor of Elections says — and the calls that follow will rest on exactly the county-by-county count Reuters described.
