Explaining Election Day: Understanding the processes from voting to declaring winners
From the Election 2024: Voting in America series
The Associated Press has created a series of videos explaining how elections work in the United States.
(16) updates to this series since Updated
It's important to remember on election night don't be fooled by early returns. They won't necessarily be reflective of how the race is going t…
Voting machines have been at the center of a web of conspiracy theories since the 2020 election, with false claims that they were manipulated …
Donald Trump continues to blame his 2020 election loss on voter fraud. To be clear, there was no widespread fraud or cheating, and Joe Biden w…
Administering an election is a balancing act. It requires making it easy for as many voters as possible to participate, tabulating and releasi…
After an election, vote results tell you who won, but they don't tell you about the people who voted in that election, what they thought of th…
Some statewide races will be so lopsided that The Associated Press will be able to declare a winner before any of the results are released. Th…
Figuring out who won any election once voting has concluded essentially boils down to two fundamental questions: how many votes have been cast…
The Associated Press has been counting the vote in US elections since 1848, and today it is a massive operation. The AP will send out about 40…
AP has a dedicated decision team of election analysts and researchers. Preparation begins months before Election Day. Analysts study past elec…
One question will be asked over and over again on election night: who won? The Associated Press will answer that question for nearly 7,000 rac…
Unlike many countries, U.S. elections are highly decentralized and include long lists of races. Elections for president and Congress all the w…
Four years of Donald Trump's false claims about a stolen 2020 election have kindled growing suspicion of voting machines among conspiracy theo…
There will be races this year that are so close that election officials will have to recount the votes to make sure they have the correct outc…
The U.S. general election this November will decide the country’s direction, but it is far from a nationally administered contest. The 50 stat…
In the United States, we actually select the president based on the outcome of the Electoral College vote. That is a vote of 538 electors, tha…
Voters today have some options in terms of how they vote and when they vote. The main choices are voting in person at a polling place on Elect…
Voting machines have been at the center of a web of conspiracy theories, with false claims that they were manipulated to steal the presidency from Donald Trump.
The few counties that have attempted the massive task to count ballots by hand have found the process more time-consuming, expensive and inaccurate than expected.
"This decentralized nature of the elections is itself a deterrent," said Republican Trey Grayson, a former Kentucky secretary of state and the advisory board chair of the Secure Elections Project.
An uncommon system of voting could be central to which party controls the U.S. House this fall — or even the presidency.
The Electoral College is the unique American system of electing presidents. It is different from the popular vote, and it has an outsize impact on how candidates win campaigns.
To help make sense of the way America picks a president, this special series is examining and explaining the ins and outs of U.S. elections.
A few bellwether counties in the key battleground states are likely to decide the outcome — as they did the past two presidential elections.
There have been 36 recounts in statewide general elections since America's most famous one in 2000.
Officials seek to demystify a process that in recent years faced intense scrutiny, misinformation and false claims of widespread fraud.
Elections are human exercises that, despite all the laws and rules governing how they should run, can sometimes appear to be messy.
Polls are useful tools, but it's important not to overstate their accuracy. After all, a polling organization can't talk to every single person in the country.
It is the concept of random selection that allows a relatively small group of survey participants to represent the country as a whole.
As thousands of counties and towns report vote totals, it can be hard to figure out when the results reported so far will reflect the outcome.
Before there was a FiveThirtyEight model, or a New York Times election night needle, or 13 keys revealing “how presidential elections really work,” there was an economist named Louis Bean.
Voters head to polls on Nov. 5 to decide between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. The balance of power in Congress all hangs in the balance.