2024-11-05
13 分钟On this Election Day episode: When will we know who won the White House? We asked David Scott, editor of the Associated Press Decision Desk. And he pulls back the curtain on its intricate process of monitoring and calling races. Votebeat’s Jessica Huseman, a recent Apple News In Conversation guest, explains one of the important upcoming deadlines in the election-certification process, and how lawsuits could disrupt that process. The 2024 election is shaping up to be the most heavily litigated in history, according to CNN’s chief legal-affairs correspondent, Paula Reid. Plus, USA Today explains why your Election Day outfit matters, the Wall Street Journal speaks with the teachers keeping this election out of their curriculum, the L.A. Times visits the county that’s predicted every presidential winner since 1980, and NBC’s state-by-state voting guide. Today’s episode was hosted by Shumita Basu.
Good morning.
It's Tuesday, November 5th, election day.
I'm Sumita Basu.
This is Apple News Today.
On today's show, an election guide with everything you need to know as you watch results roll.
Let's start with the question that every American wants to know.
When will we know who won this election?
Now, depending on how old you are, you might be used to the idea of waking up on Wednesday morning to election results.
That was the case in 2008 and 2012 when Barack Obama won and in 2016 when Donald Trump won.
But in 2020, it took until the Saturday after Election Day for it to get called for Joe Biden.
And in all of those cases, it's not like some formal federal agency made that declaration.
It was media organizations.
A lot of them, including Apple News, rely on specifically the Associated Press to make the calls.
So we called up David Scott.
He's the editor in charge of the decision desk at the Associated Press.
And we asked him, what do you at the AP watch on election night?
There's no national, single commission or agency that adds up all those votes and says who's won nationwide, unlike in many other Western style democracies.
So you can have something as complicated or sophisticated as a state sending out their vote totals from the elections taking place in their state via a programmatic feed and something as simple as a picture of vote results written on a whiteboard posted to a Facebook page.
The AP has closely monitored our patchwork system of election reporting for almost 200 years, since the election of President Zachary Taylor.
And it's developed its own system to determine when a race, from the presidential to congressional seats down to local races, can be called with 100% confidence.