It would be surprising if even one in a thousand voters knew that the media can call a state winner in a presidential election before any Election Day votes made in voting booths are counted. In so-called noncompetitive contests, the media can, and do, declare winners immediately after the polls close.
Even fewer voters might be aware that in such noncompetitive races, the calling of a winner right when polls close is based in part on a survey called AP VoteCast conducted by an academic institution before and during the election. Your vote on Election Day is therefore made irrelevant to the immediate decision to call the race, supplanted by a preelection survey you’ve never heard of administered by an organization you don’t know about combined with undisclosed theoretical modeling done by the media’s decision desks.
The ballot you submit remains of paramount importance because only state-certified vote counts decide the winner of the election. The process of vote counting might take several days, so all declarations of state winners on election night are merely estimates made by the media. These predictions of outcomes are sophisticated, cross-checked, and based on a host of inputs but are informed guesses nonetheless.
The Associated Press claims “only a small number” of states will be considered for poll-close calls in Tuesday’s election. However, cross-referencing the state-by-state chronology of 2020 presidential race calls against CBS’s 2020 list of poll-closing times indicates that 26 of 50 states were called at the time of poll closing.
It is theoretically possible that the election results of slightly more than half of the states, equaling 258 total electoral votes representing roughly 153,508,000 citizens, were declared as soon as polls closed based on preelection mail-in and early in-person voting results, as well as proprietary analysis, but not on votes made in booths on Election Day. The Associated Press and all other major networks were contacted for this article and either declined to reply or did not provide details of their methods, which is unsurprising given that the various decision desks keep their precise calculations under wraps due to competition with the other networks.
No institution, governmental entity, or citizen body convened to design our fragmented system for calling elections. Voters have unwittingly ceded the critical power to call a winner in our presidential race to the media with their record-low levels of trust. Worse, the referees calling the game are not wearing black-and-white-striped referee uniforms. They are draped in blue. In a 2022 poll, only 3.4% of journalists reported being Republicans. Objectivity has long been jettisoned from newsrooms, in which journalists inject themselves into stories with opinion, commentary, loaded adjectives, and fact checks.
A fair question is whether a premature decision to call a state winner matters when the results turn out later to be correct. The timing of the call, however, is of supreme significance. For instance, NPR proclaimed that Fox News’s early 2020 call in Arizona “opened up a wider path” for President Joe Biden to win. It simultaneously painted former President Donald Trump as “Ferdinand Marcos refusing to leave the palace,” according to wag Mark Steyn. Although we want to see results fast, our national election should not be a decentralized sandbox in which networks compete for ratings or scoop each other on who calls a state first.
All methods for calculating and reporting winners should be open-source, standardized, and available to the public. No arcane mathematical techniques, proprietary algorithms, or special sauce. Let’s count the votes. Networks can still vie for viewers based on the quality of political commentary and availability of coverage across various platforms.
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In this most partisan of endeavors, no entity with the solemn responsibility to call our national election should be of a single political party. In our low-trust environment, changes to how winners are declared will demand not new methods or systems but old ones.
Princeton political science professor Robert George recently told me we should return to paper ballots collected on “an actual Election Day.” Vote counting should begin aloud after polls close and continue all night until it is done. Precinct reports will let us know who is winning as the night goes on. The only way to restore trust on both sides of the aisle is for every voter to observe the entire electoral process and know his or her vote counted.
Mark J. Kilbane is a consultant and former congressional candidate. He has a master of public policy degree from the University of Oxford.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
