How Election Night Race Calls Will Work: 4,000 AP Reporters, Two Vote Counts, and Virginia's 7 P.M. Poll Close Among the First
When winners flash on screens Tuesday night, almost all of them will trace back to two vote counts - the Associated Press count, gathered by more than 4,000 reporters, or Decision Desk HQ's official-source count. Reuters explains how the calls get made, and why they are occasionally withdrawn.
The first winners of the 2026 midterms will be declared long before every vote is counted, and nearly every declaration on television and online will rest on the same foundation. According to Reuters' guide to election-night race 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 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 Associated Press has counted votes in every United States election since 1848, 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. When it makes a call, the AP uses reported vote totals and estimates how many votes remain uncounted based on past voting patterns and early-vote data - and it calls a race only when the trailing candidate cannot catch up. Decision Desk HQ works the other side of the same street: it collects vote counts from official state sources, usually secretaries of state or state election departments, processes roughly 80 percent of votes by pulling data directly from official election websites, and requires unanimous team agreement and a sign-off from its head of data science, Scott Tranter, before any final projection.
For the capital region, the clock starts early. The first calls 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., when Virginia's Senate and House races join the board. Calls can occasionally be wrong: retractions are rare, Reuters notes, but DDHQ withdrew a projection in the 2025 Seattle mayor's race and another earlier this year in the Democratic primary for the special election in New Jersey's 11th Congressional District, and the AP retracted a 2018 call in California's 21st District after the projected winner fell behind. The trust stakes are real - an October poll for the Medill Local News Initiative and the Alliance for Trust in Media found that while more than 60 percent of Americans have some confidence in news organizations to report accurate election results, only 32 percent have high confidence.
