How news outlets are bracing for an election night cliffhanger

By Hadas Gold, CNN

New York (CNN) — By all accounts, it is unlikely Americans will go to bed on Election Day knowing who their next president will be. As polls show a dead heat between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris in the final days of the race, news outlets are preparing an anxious nation for the likelihood that election night will stretch into an election week.

Already, in the days before the Nov. 5 election, misinformation about everything from ballot stuffing to voting machines has gone viral on social media, forcing news organizations to be even more transparent with their audiences about how they plan to project winners in the high-stakes election.

Most major media outlets around the country rely on a handful of organizations to crunch the numbers and make race calls. Among them: The Associated Press, the National Election Pool and Decision Desk HQ.

The AP, an independent news collective that has been calling elections since the 1800s, plans to deploy roughly 4,000 vote reporters to precincts across the country to be its eyes and ears as ballots are counted, said AP executive editor Julie Pace.

“With the way that misinformation has really, really flourished, and the speed at which misinformation moves, you’re going to see us do a lot more to pull back the curtain on now leading into the election, on what we’re looking at, as we are going to be looking at the vote and calling races and then coming out of those race calls, how we did it,” Pace told CNN.

Election officials in several battleground states have already said that misinformation promoted by Elon Musk has created a “huge problem” as they struggle to combat a flood of false claims from the billionaire X owner and his social media platform. Trump and his allies have also continued to repeat the lie that the former president won in 2020, a bogus claim amplified in right-wing media that led to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.

“We’re also going to be really transparent about why we may not be able to call a race,” Pace said. “We know that sometimes those are the moments where actually, misinformation can flourish the most.”

While many counties post their vote tallies online for the public to view, Pace said having a direct line to reporters in local precincts is invaluable as there can sometimes be a lag between the time ballots are counted and reported online, or if extenuating circumstances arise.

Waiting days for a winner

That will be especially important if the race takes days to call. In 2020, Joe Biden was not declared the winner of the presidential election until Saturday, several days after election night. While votes were still being counted, Trump falsely claimed victory and that his opponents were perpetuating fraud.

This year, news organizations are once again preparing for the likelihood that a winner will not be declared on election night and that Trump could again declare himself the victor, throwing the public’s understanding of the race into chaos.

While election officials do not expect to receive the same high volume of mail-in ballots as they did in 2020, they are still preparing to see much bigger numbers than in previous non-pandemic years. And in some must-win states that could decide the race, like Pennsylvania, election rules dictate that workers “can’t even open the envelope and unfold it and flatten it until the polls open on Election Day,” CNN political director David Chalian said.

Those rules could delay the time for a winner to be determined.

“The added component then is, is it razor-thin? Are we waiting on those mail ballots to be counted to determine a winner?” Chalian said. “With all of these races and these seven battleground states being so close right now, if the polling is correct, then these counting processes and timelines are definitely going to dictate when we are going to be able to have enough vote to project a winner.”

Those very narrow margins could push back the moment when CNN will reach the “99.9 percent confidence level” it needs to project a winner, Chalian said, potentially requiring nearly every vote to be officially counted and processed before a victor can be declared.

“We get to that level of certainty much faster in a race where one candidate has a 40-point lead than when one candidate has a three-tenths of a percentage point lead,” Chalian said.

CNN is part of the National Election Pool, a consortium of news outlets that includes ABC, CBS and NBC, which works with the data and polling firm Edison Research to provide vote count and exit pool data. The network is also deploying dozens of reporters, correspondents, producers and more out to major battleground states to be in direct contact with county officials.

In 2020, Fox News famously made an early and risky call that Biden would win the battleground state of Arizona. While Biden went on to carry the state by roughly 10,000 votes, the network came under assault from Trump and his allies, who blasted the right-wing network’s election night projection. Two Fox News executives later departed the network over the controversial call.

Arnon Mishkin, the head of Fox News’ decision desk, told Axios last week that the network would do more to ensure its anchors and viewers have a clearer understanding of why races are being called.

“I think that there’s going to be a much greater focus on making sure that when we make a call, that call is made by the right anchor,” Mishkin said. “We’ve adjusted some of our communication systems to make sure that happens.”

How projections are made

Scott Tranter, chief data scientist for the startup voting data firm Decision Desk HQ, which is providing race calls to NewsNation, HuffPost, The Economist, and Scripps among others, will have about 1,000 vote reporters working on election night, helping them project some 40,000 races.

“Everything from a mosquito control board race in South Florida to the presidential race in Pennsylvania and everything in between,” he said.

As votes are tabulated, projecting election winners becomes a math equation, Tranter said.

“How many votes does Candidate A have? How many votes does Candidate B have? All the way down to however many candidates there are, we determine how many votes are left, and if Candidate B, who is in second, is not determined to be able to get enough of the remaining vote left to overtake Candidate A, who is in first, then we’re ready to project a winner,” Tranter said.

At Decision Desk HQ’s headquarters in Washington, DC, at least three people out of their team of 15 race callers must agree with 99.9% certainty that a winner can be projected. Having deep historical knowledge of how counties and states have voted in the past will also help provide certainty in the rare case of an abnormality, Tranter said.

“One way we do that is voting trends in each of these different precincts and counties. If big vote movements happen that are not along with the trend, that raises a red flag in our system and something we go investigate,” Tranter said.

But the chances of that happening are very low.

“American elections are historically really well run,” Pace said. “They’re complex and they’re complicated, but they’re historically very well run with exceptional, minimal levels of real voter fraud.”

“If we’re in an extended vote count situation where the call can’t be made, there’s probably going to be a very legitimate reason for that,” Pace said. “We just have to make sure that we’re explaining that to people.”

While each election results provider has their own specific steps before a race can be called, they are all preparing for a long election night that could turn into days or even weeks before a presidential winner is declared.

“Lots of snacks, and breakfast is being planned,” Pace said.

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