for over 150 years the Associated Press has been tallying votes and declaring winners for all us elections obviously that’s not very easy so how do we do it instead of relying on crowdsourcing or technology that could be subject to manipulation our network of over 4,000 local reporters across the country have firsthand knowledge of their territories and trusted relationships with County clerks and other local officials they are the ones who collect the raw vote totals at a local level that is the first step the vote count reporters will then call in their results to to a vote entry Center which puts the results into ap’s election system after verifying the results AP delivers them to other news outlets that’s the second step the results are updated throughout the evening and the days following the election until every race is called and state officials can certify that the results are final AP employs dozens of quality checks on its results and quite often were’re able to spot errors and inform local election officials about them before they’re published and that is the third step