How Election Results Are Called: The AP's 4,000 Reporters, Two Count Providers, and the Math Behind Tuesday Night's Calls
When Pensacola's polls close at 7 p.m. Tuesday, the winners viewers see declared on television will come from a system Reuters laid out on Sunday: the Associated Press or Decision Desk HQ counts, decision desks that call a race only when the trailing candidate cannot catch up - and the first calls of the night, an hour earlier, in Indiana and Kentucky.
Every winner declared on television on Tuesday night starts with one of two counts. Most US television networks and digital outlets rely on two providers for vote totals - the Associated Press or the election-data firm Decision Desk HQ - Reuters explained on Sunday, in a guide to how the 2026 midterm calls will be made. Some outlets, such as the Wall Street Journal and MS NOW, will rely solely on the AP for race calls, while others, including Fox News and CBS News, make their own projections from the AP vote count, exit polls, early-vote totals and their own statistical modeling.
The AP's part of that system is the oldest in American elections: the nonprofit newsroom has counted votes in every US election since 1848, and for the 2026 midterms it will deploy more than 4,000 reporters at county election offices and polling locations, gathering and providing data to the decision desks at ABC News, CBS News, Fox, CNN and NBC News. The discipline behind a call is conservative by design - the AP calls a race only when the trailing candidate cannot catch up, using vote totals and estimates of how many ballots remain uncounted, built from past voting patterns and early-vote data, and computing the percentage counted by dividing officials' reported votes by its estimated total turnout.
For Florida viewers, the night starts before Florida reports anything: the first calls come soon after polls begin closing nationally, first with Indiana and Kentucky at 6 p.m. Eastern - 5 p.m. in Pensacola - and then Georgia, South Carolina, Vermont and Virginia at 7 p.m. Eastern, with instant calls possible in races where much of the voting has already taken place. Fox's decision desk will make its own calls in all statewide races and for control of the House and the Senate, and the New York Times relies on AP calls for most contests while independently reviewing competitive ones. Escambia County's own races - the governor, the Senate, LOST and Amendment 3 - will be called under the same rule as every race in the country: not when a candidate is ahead, but when the candidate behind cannot catch up.
