Many newsrooms – including PBS News – rely on The Associated Press on election night. The AP gathers and standardizes data from local and state election agencies to make it publicly available as quickly and accurately as possible.
Using a combination of vote totals, AP VoteCast survey data, historic voting and registration patterns, journalists at the AP will declare a winner in more than 5,000 contested races this year. The AP has a history of accuracy dating back to its first vote count effort in 1848.
PBS News Hour correspondent Lisa Desjardins recently took a closer look at how the AP keeps track of thousands of competitive races.
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