How Election Night Race Calls Actually Work: 4,000 AP Reporters, Two Vote Counters, and a Call Only When a Candidate Cannot Catch Up
When a winner appears on your screen Tuesday night long before every vote is counted, it will have come from one of two counting operations - and from a rule both of them state the same way: a race is called only when the trailing candidate cannot catch up.
Tallahassee voters watching returns on Tuesday night will see winners projected in race after race, often long before the counting is finished. A Reuters explainer published Sunday lays out the machinery behind those calls. Most television networks and digital outlets rely on two providers for vote counts: the Associated Press or the election-data firm Decision Desk HQ. The Wall Street Journal and MS NOW will rely solely on the AP, Reuters reported, while Fox News and CBS News make their own projections from the AP vote count, exit polls, early-vote totals and their own modeling.
The AP has counted votes in every U.S. election since 1848, and for the 2026 midterms it says it will deploy more than 4,000 reporters at county election offices and polling locations, feeding the decision desks at ABC, CBS, Fox, CNN and NBC. Its method is deliberately plain: it works from vote totals, estimates how many votes remain uncounted from past patterns and early-vote data, and calls a race only when the trailing candidate cannot catch up. Decision Desk HQ collects counts from official state sources, refines its turnout estimate through the night, and requires unanimous agreement from its team plus a sign-off from its head of data science, Scott Tranter, before a final projection. The first calls of the night follow the 6 p.m. Eastern poll closings in Indiana and Kentucky on Tuesday.
The system is built to be careful, and Reuters notes it has still had to reverse itself. Decision Desk HQ withdrew a projection in the 2025 Seattle mayor's race and another in a New Jersey special-election primary earlier this year after later counts shifted those races, and the AP retracted a 2018 call in a California congressional race when the projected winner fell behind. That history lands in a low-trust moment: an October poll for the Medill Local News Initiative and the Alliance for Trust in Media, cited by Reuters, found more than 60 percent of Americans have some confidence in news organizations to report accurate election results - but only 32 percent have high confidence. For Leon County, where polls run 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday, the practical lesson is the one both counters state themselves: an early projection is an estimate with a rule behind it, not a finished count.
