In a packed session to end the first full day of MediaFest 25, Associated Press elections and democracy reporter Robert Yoon took attendees “under the hood” of his organization’s election reporting and result calling.
Yoon focused on four key questions about election reporting and calling: whose job it is to decide who won an election, where election results come from, why news organizations count and call races and how news outlets call them.
AP first started calling elections in 1848 to simplify what was a very complicated system of calculating vote totals for voters, said Yoon.
For a voter to get their own vote total for a presidential election, the process is longer than most would commit to. It required going to all 50 states’ records online, downloading dozens of pages-long PDFs and then adding together 50 state vote totals to get the national vote total.
“There is really this need, I think, for some entity to translate all of this for the people,” said Yoon.
Official results from elections at every level – from local offices up to the presidency – are not released for several months after the election. Without the press making calculated calls, the public would be lost on the outcome and more susceptible to candidates’ claims of winning that may not be factual. The AP aims to protect the public from potentially false claims about election outcomes with reputable, factual information, said Yoon.
The waiting period for official results from states’ election commissions was a surprise to Yoon at the beginning of his career, as an elections reporter at CNN. Before his first election cycle, he called a local elections office to get the basics and was shocked to learn that even elections workers get their initial news of who won “from the TV,” as that worker told him years ago.
“I am the TV!” Yoon said, describing his original reaction as he learned about the process.
The process of calling an election at the AP is a calculated balance between votes that have been reported by local precincts, what votes have not come in yet and the larger context of where the votes are coming from, such as in-person versus vote-by-mail ballots and the traditional political lean of that community.
“When you’re tallying up the votes, it almost feels like looking around asking, ‘Do you know? How about you, do you know?’” said Yoon.
The AP’s reporting goes far beyond election night numbers, said Yoon. In recent years, he and his colleagues have navigated major changes to elections in the United States, such as an increase in mail-in ballots and the politicization of voting modalities in 2020.
Throughout the entire process, the right of the people, their vote and their right to information about the elections they vote in are always the priority, said Yoon.
“When dealing with numbers, it’s important to keep in mind that every number isn’t just a figure, it’s a person,” said Yoon. “That can’t be forgotten.”