Joe Biden has been declared, on Saturday, the next President of the United States with Kamala Harris as Vice President, reports the AP.
Biden crossed the 270 needed Electoral College votes with a win in Pennsylvania.
“The AP called the [Pennsylvania] race for Biden, who held a 34,243-vote lead, after it determined that the remaining ballots left to be counted would not allow Trump to catch up,” reports AP.
ABC News is characterizing Biden as the “apparent winner” in Pennsylvania because the vote is very close and has not yet been certified. Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes, would put him over the required 270 needed to win the White House.
Fox News is also projecting Biden the winner, saying “it came as the Fox News Decision Desk projected Saturday that Biden will win the state of Nevada and the commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”
CNN and NBC also project Biden the winner.
Biden becomes the 46th president of the United States.
This election has been historic with at least 159.8 million Americans voting in the 2020 presidential election. The projected vote total marks a record high number of ballots cast in a presidential election and the highest voter turnout rate among eligible citizens since 1900. President-Elect Joe Biden has also received more votes than any president in history. Kamala Harris also makes history as the first woman and first woman of color to be Vice President.
How Elections Are Called
Here’s a rundown of how some of the major news sites make election calls:
Edison Research
Edison Research was founded in 1994 as a media research company, conducting audience and content analysis for broadcasting entities all over the globe. In 2003, the company became the sole provider of exit polling data to the television networks comprising the National Election Pool (ABC News, CBS News, CNN, and NBC News), and has served continuously in that capacity for all U.S. general elections since then, as well as hundreds of important primaries and caucuses and other election events both in America and abroad.
Fox News Voter Analysis & AP VoteCast
Fox News and the Associated Press worked with NORC (National Opinion Research Center) at the University of Chicago to come up with a combination phone and internet poll.
Arnon Mishkin, the director of Fox News Decision Desk, works with a team of eight statisticians, journalists, political scientists, and pollsters who crunch election numbers as they are reported by the Associated Press and the NORC at the University of Chicago. The team doesn’t use exit polls to gauge how candidates are performing. Instead, they rely on the Fox News Voter Analysis, a survey tool that contacts more than 100,000 Americans to estimate vote count leading up to Election Day.
AP’s race callers are staff who are deeply familiar with the states where they declare winners. Most have called races in a state for many years. Their work begins months before Election Day, as they study election rules and recount requirements and track changes and updates to election law. They work with AP’s political and government reporters to sharpen their understanding of campaigns and track coverage of races from AP member news organizations and customers.
They also review and rely on information from AP’s election research group. They know before polls close how each county and congressional district in their state has voted in past elections, the state’s past results for voting by mail and early in-person voting, and the state’s history of counting votes after Election Day.
Every election year, race callers also complete extensive training sessions designed to review and refresh the analytical skills required to make accurate decisions on election night. Learn more here.
This article has been updated to provide information on the process of how some of the major news companies call elections.
