Statistics, basically all of the data that's available to us with the vote count being at the heart of it, when we've determined that data makes it very clear that the trailing candidates can't catch the leader, that's when we're able to declare a winner.
How do you sort through all that data?
That is a lot of data to sort through in a timely manner to make a call.
Yeah, so at the Associated Press, we'll be declaring winners in about 4,800 elections this November.
And that assumes none of those go to a runoff, which of course some of them will in Georgia and Louisiana and the other states where there are runoffs.
And so it is a tremendous amount of data.
And we do it with a tremendous team.
It's a big team.
So our decision team at AP, 60 people, several of whom are full-time focused on elections.
So they're always working on this all of the time.
But under that is the team that's generating that data.
And so we'll have totality across the Associated Press, about 5,000 people on the night of the general election who are working to collect the vote, count the vote, quality check it, analyze it, publish it, and then ultimately declare winners.
You mentioned votecast.
What is that?
So votecast is our survey of the electorate.
You know, we are looking to talk to voters as they are in the process of casting their ballot, either in advance or on election day.
We execute that survey across all 50 states, and it's really the largest survey of its kind.
We're aiming to talk to more than 120,000 voters in the week leading up to election day, right up until the moment polls close.
We're asking them who they voted for, but also the things that motivated them as they cast their ballots, the issues that they cared most about, what they thought about the direction of the country.
And that additional data we only use to declare winners, but not only to declare winners, we also use it to tell stories and to understand the electorate and to really inform all of our coverage on election night.