PORTLAND, Ore — Votes continue to be counted across the country as Americans wait in anticipation to find out who the next president of the United States will be.
If you’re flipping through the channels, you may have noticed that depending on where you watch, the Electoral College numbers may differ as each network has declared or projected different outcomes.
According to The New York Times, news networks planned to be more cautious about calls this election cycle.
Right now, the biggest difference is that the Associated Press is making its own calls with its own projection models through AP VoteCast, while ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN are in Edison Research’s National Election Pool.
Both the National Election Pool and AP VoteCast collect data that is used to project races, with exit polls being a key component of both. The AP explains that VoteCast also reaches beyond exit polls -- reaching voters by mail, phone, and online like a traditional poll -- to account for early and mail-in voters. The National Election Pool expanded in-person early voting interviews this year to account for increases in such voting.
The different media outlets that call races separately follow similar methodology and decision-making to the AP, even if it’s not entirely the same. That means that they may call races soon after each other, but not call them at the exact same time.
This is true even of the networks that use the National Election Pool. For example, ABC News has opted to take longer to call races than other media outlets this Election cycle and has generally waited until after precincts begin to report vote counts to call races.
NBC makes most of its calls on election races “based on analyses of the precinct- and county-level vote returns.”
Fox News, on the other hand, calls its races based on Fox News Voter Analysis. The network has a partnership with the AP and uses VoteCast, and thus uses the same methods to take early votes into account.
You may have noticed that the calls NBC makes don't always line up with what you're seeing on KGW's local broadcast coverage or KGW digital and social platforms, that's because KGW uses AP information to call national races.
The New York Times has put together a tool to track in real-time where networks stand with their Electoral College counts.
