The 2024 election season saw high voter participation and a close race. This is good news for our democracy, and we hope people will continue to participate and stay engaged.
When we have a close election, it’s important to remember that the outcome is only official after every ballot has been counted and certified by state officials, which can take days (or even weeks) after Election Day. This process also requires careful consideration of how to communicate that information to the public.
After Election Day polls close, news outlets report unofficial results in real time as they track local counting locations and source data from a variety of sources. These are often based on the results of exit polls, totals for early in-person and mail ballots that are cast before Election Day, and patterns from previous elections. Often, these data sources are combined and aggregated by the media to produce their projections and call a winner in a given race.
This is a difficult task, and the data-driven systems used by media outlets are complex. Because these systems are so complicated and require large amounts of resources to maintain, they may have small differences from one outlet to the next. In these cases, the difference represents the choice of different news outlets to focus their reporting on particular races and how confident they are in their analysis. News outlets only make a call when they are confident in their prediction, and no one knows how many votes have actually been cast until they are all certified by state election officials.