WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s election night, the polls are closed and chances are you’re waiting for The Associated Press or one of the major television networks to say who will be the next president. But why do the news media play that role in the first place? Shouldn’t that be the government’s job?

INTERACTIVE MAP: Make your own projections for the 2024 presidential race, based on race ratings from Cook Political Report

State and local governments organize and administer U.S. elections, including the race for president. They are responsible for counting the votes and keeping the official record of who won and by how much.

But the official process — from poll closing to final certification — can take states anywhere from a few days to more than a month. In the race for the White House, the formal process of choosing the president through the Electoral College will not be completed until early January. In the meantime, no federal agency or election commission is giving the public any updates on what’s happening with their votes.

“That’s a hole in the Constitution left by the founders that AP filled just two years after our company was founded,” said David Scott, an AP vice president who oversees the news agency’s election operations. “It was essential then, as it is today, that Americans have an independent, nonpartisan source for the entire picture of the election – most critically for the very crucial news about who won the election.”

A brief history of race calls

The AP was founded in 1846 as a newspaper cooperative. Two years later, election results were tabulated for the first time, when Zachary Taylor won the presidential election as a member of the Whig Party. The effort to collect results from jurisdictions in the young country relied on the telegraph, took 72 hours and cost an exorbitant $1,000 at the time.

In 1916, the first election broadcast was broadcast over a small network of ham radios, according to a history written by the late CBS News political director Martin Plissner. The announcer closed the program by incorrectly declaring that Republican Charles Evans Hughes had won the presidency over Democrat Woodrow Wilson. The AP called the race for Wilson two days later as soon as it could report results from California.

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In the early 1960s, the AP and the three broadcast networks – ABC, CBS and NBC – each independently conducted vote counts. They agreed to pool their resources in the 1964 election to compile vote tallies for key races, an arrangement that would last in some form for more than 50 years and eventually expand to include exit polls of voters on the election day.

After the 2016 election, the AP left the network pool to continue its independent vote counting and launch the AP VoteCast survey of the American electorate as an alternative to the network’s exit polls. The networks, now including CNN, remain in the pool today, receiving their vote count and exit poll data from Edison Research. Fox News endorses AP’s vote count, as do thousands of news organizations in the United States and around the world, and partnered with AP to conduct the VoteCast survey.

Counting the votes

When counting votes, the AP does not actually map the results of individual voters’ actual ballots. That work is performed by the local government election officials who administer elections in the United States.

Aside from setting some general guidelines, the Constitution leaves the details of actually conducting elections up to the states, meaning there are 51 (don’t forget the District of Columbia) different rules for conducting elections.

Some of those rules are more voter-friendly than others.

In New Hampshire, election results could be officially certified a few days after Election Day. In California, the tabulation process takes several weeks and final election results are not announced until early December. The other states are somewhere in between.

When reporting their results, some jurisdictions use a format that makes it difficult to immediately determine who won, such as not including percentages in raw vote totals or displaying the vote totals of candidates in the same contest across multiple pages of a scanned PDF document. Most election officials post unofficial results for their county or city online on election night; a handful only release the first results later.

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According to Scott, counting the votes for the AP is an attempt to make sense of all that information. “What we do is aggregate all the vote totals from thousands of counties and cities across the country into one standardized format so that voters can access the total votes for a race,” he said.

Announce election winners

The presidential election has more moving parts than any other electoral contest, including the complexities of the Electoral College. The Constitution directs each state to determine its own electors and send the results of their votes for president to the National Archives and to Congress, to be tallied a few weeks after Election Day.

In modern elections, where states have instructed electors to vote for the winner of the popular vote in their state, voters know who won the White House well before the formalities of the Electoral College play out through the AP’s “race calls.” and the networks. They are not official government decrees, but they provide the country with a timely and independent assessment of the condition of a breed.

“The AP’s standard is to call a race when we are 100% certain there is no path for the trailing candidate to overtake the leading candidate,” said Anna Johnson, chief of news agency in Washington. “The AP uses the same standard for all race calls from the presidency to the ballot. Independent and timely race calls by the AP and other media help ensure voters understand not only who won a race, but how they won it.