Counting the vote

A: From before dawn and continuing until the count is complete weeks after Election Day, thousands of AP journalists work around the clock to report on the results of a U.S. general election. Political reporters spend their day with candidates and interviewing voters. Vote count reporters and vote entry clerks work together to collect results at thousands of county election offices and voting precincts from coast to coast, and AP editors then use those results to declare winners up and down the ballot. Software engineers and technical staff monitor their systems and keep the results moving smoothly to their members and customers around the globe. 

It’s all part of a tightly calibrated plan designed to accurately and swiftly report the nation’s election results – the largest single act of journalism there is. 

A: Before polls close, over 4,000 vote count reporters arrive at county election offices and local voting precincts. When the first polls close, they’ll be ready to report on the results from inside the locations where ballots are actually counted, phoning in raw vote totals as soon as they are available. In all, there’s an AP vote count reporter at nearly every county election office in America on Election Day. 

Close to 1,000 vote entry clerks will answer calls from vote count reporters and walk each through a precise process designed to quickly and accurately enter each candidate’s vote totals into their election night reporting system. The clerks are encouraged to ask questions of the reporters to ensure the count is correct. They’ll ask whether there are any problems in their county, and question the reported vote totals if the results look unusual. Built into the election night reporting system are a series of automated quality control checks that interrupt clerks if something submitted appears amiss, requiring confirmation of numbers if they are inconsistent or statistically unlikely. 

Since many states and counties display election results on websites, another group of clerks monitors those sites and enters the results into the same system. AP also takes in feeds of results directly from election officials where they are provided. Their goal is to have at least two, and in many cases three or more, sources for vote totals from every county. Those multiple sources don’t just serve as a backup to each other, but they also provide a check to help ensure the vote totals they are reporting are correct.

A: At every step in the process, we’ve built in checks and double checks that are applied by the human vote count reporters and vote entry clerks. And then, the vote totals they enter into their election night reporting system are checked again by dozens of automated tests that look at the numbers from every possible angle in search of discrepancies or apparent inconsistencies. 

For example, if a clerk tries to enter a vote total for a candidate that is greater than the number of registered voters in a county, the system will force them to stop and double check their work. Any time a clerk enters totals that show a significant disparity from expected patterns or a county’s previous voting history, they’ll be asked to slow down and confirm with a supervisor the numbers they have are correct. 

Separately, their full-time team of election research and quality control analysts are monitoring the results as they are entered and looking for anomalies, using sophisticated tools and their own research to ensure what AP reports is the true and accurate count of votes. They’re alerted every time a new candidate takes the lead in a race, for example, and they then check to make sure that lead change is legitimate.

A: They take the role AP plays in the American democracy seriously, and that applies to the tools they use to count the vote as much as it does to the processes they use to tabulate the vote. 

Every part of their election night reporting system has a fully redundant backup that will allow us to keep counting the vote in the case of a technical failure. If one or more of AP’s systems goes down, the system automatically fails over to a backup system. These systems undergo extensive testing.

A: Among the questions most often asked after polls close is, "How many votes are left to count?" They do their best to answer that question by reporting an estimate of the percentage of vote counted alongside the genuine vote totals. 

We start by estimating the overall expected turnout in a state based on a variety of factors, such as turnout in recent elections and details on early voting. This is done as a comparison to the turnout in a past election; for example, they might estimate the total number of ballots cast in a state in the 2022 general election vote will be 103% of the number of votes cast in that state in the 2018 general election. 

As more states expand early voting and voting by mail, the details on advance vote become more important and valuable in setting that initial estimate. It provides us with a known data point for the current election, helping make the estimate more precise from the outset. Once polls close and they start getting genuine returns, they further refine the estimate with genuine data. 

To be sure, their reporting of expected vote is an estimate. It can and will fluctuate as the vote tabulation takes place and they learn more about how many people have actually cast a ballot. 

Here’s the footnote they use on their election maps: “Expected vote is an Associated Press estimate of how much of the vote in an election has been counted. It is informed by turnout in recent elections, details on votes cast in advance and – after polls close – early returns. The estimate may fluctuate as election officials report additional results and AP learns more about how many voters have cast a ballot.” 

A: In some states, the percentage of precincts reporting is a reasonably accurate estimate of the amount of vote that’s been counted – particularly in those states that do not separately report results for ballots cast in advance from those cast on Election Day. They use precincts reporting as one of the data points that helps us estimate the amount of vote left to be counted. 

In other states, however, the percentage of precincts reporting can be deceiving. 

In some jurisdictions, election officials may report all of the vote cast early as being from a single precinct. A precinct may also initially release some – but not all – of its results, which means there can still be votes left to count in a precinct counted as reporting. This is why it’s possible for more votes to be added to the count in a race even when 99% or more of precincts are reporting. This issue is often evident in a race where mail ballots may be accepted and counted well after Election Day. This is not a new phenomenon, but it has become more of a challenge due to the expansion of advance voting spurred by the start of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. 

In all races tabulated by AP, they do provide details on precincts reporting. But they think their expected vote estimate more consistently provides the best available picture of how many votes are left to be counted, which is why that’s the figure they use on their election maps and in their news report to describe the state of every race.

A: AP begins reporting election results as soon as they are available on the day of an election, which may be as early as the first statutory poll close time in a state.  

Poll close times vary from state to state, and some states have multiple poll close times depending on how many time zones fall within its borders. 

It’s tradition for some small towns in New Hampshire, such as Dixville Notch and Millsfield, to open their polls at 12 a.m. ET on Election Day and report their results as soon as voters have finished casting their ballots – long before New Hampshire releases statewide results.  

We report the vote from Dixville Notch and Millsfield as soon as it becomes available … and then wait with everyone else for polls to start closing nationwide come election night.

Q: How does redistricting affect the vote count? 

A: Every 10 years, and occasionally more often due to legal challenges, the boundaries of districts in the U.S. House of Representatives and state legislatures nationwide are redrawn to reflect the results of the latest U.S. Census. Their reporting of the vote totals, and their presentation of vote tallies on election results maps and other charts, reflects those updated districts.  

In some states, the changes to district lines are small. In others, entirely new maps are required to account for the addition of a seat to account for a growing population. That means in other states, a new map is needed to account for the subtraction of a district. This can lead to confusion as incumbent office holders adjust to the boundaries of new legislative districts. 

Here’s how they handle it at AP.  

An incumbent is a current holder of an elected office. During an election, a candidate is labeled as an incumbent if they are seeking reelection to their current legislative body or public office. For example, a current member of the U.S. House seeking any seat in the U.S. House will be labeled an incumbent. But a current member of the House seeking election to the U.S. Senate will NOT be labeled as an incumbent. 

Incumbents may seek reelection in a district with different boundaries and district names than in the preceding election, prior to the redistricting process. For example, a U.S. House member currently representing a state's 1st Congressional District seeking reelection to the U.S. House in the state's newly created 2nd Congressional District is still an incumbent. This means that it is possible for a race to feature two or more incumbents. 

A: Elections in the United States can be messy affairs. Voters cast ballots in dozens of different ways in more than 10,000 jurisdictions across the country, and elections officials release results in hundreds of different ways. Voters are human – and so are the people who collect and count their ballots. They make mistakes on occasion. Those mistakes are almost always caught within a few minutes. Sometimes within a few seconds. It’s rare than an error lingers for hours. AP employs dozens of quality checks on the results it collects and tabulates, and quite often, we’re able to spot errors and inform local election officials about an unusual number before it’s published. But on occasion, an honest mistake does make it past elections officials and AP alike. It’s their job, and their commitment, to fix those errors as soon as they are discovered.

Ashampoo PDF Free: Edit, Create, and Manage PDF files on Windows 10

We recently talked about Ashampoo Burning Studio, which is still available for free, and now its time to talk about their professional but free PDF software, which is also available for free. PDF is actively used throughout the world, and one of the toughest parts is editing it. Not any more. Ashampoo PDF offers professional-grade software with features that can suffice the need for most of the consumers. I would strongly suggest downloading this right away if you do not have any PDF editor on your computer. Let’s talk about Ashampoo PDF Free.

Before I start, once you download the software, it will be activated using your Ashampoo account. You can use your email id to create one if you don’t have one. Your Ashampoo account will have the record of all Ashampoo products you have downloaded along with the activation keys. You can also download all the activation keys in PDF format.

Reading PDF is not a problem anymore. Most modern browsers support it out of the box. What is tough is editing it, deleting or adding pages, filling forms, and so on. 

These features are most useful for those who need to edit PDF documents now, and then, but even if you need to do it sometime, make sure you have this on the computer. Since this is the primary focus of the software, let’s talk about it first.

Any PDF file you open will be available to edit instantly. So if you are using this as a PDF reader as well, make sure to switch to View mode ( Edit > Work Mode > Viewing). Once you are through, switch to Editing mode.

When you click anywhere or drag on the PDF file, it will create a text box where you can write your text. You can change fonts, text size, alignment, line spacing, and even use a highlighter. You can increase or decrease the text box size as well.

When editing files, you have the option to “Revert to Saved.” If you are not sure if this is the editing you wanted as a final result, you can use it to go back to the last saved state.

The tool can also be used as a markup tool. If you mostly approve and point out the already created PDF tool, then use this. The markup tool offers. You can add comments, draw rectangles, circles, polygons, scribble to draw as you wish, line tools. Your name will be used, so if anybody else opens the PDF file, the person will be able to read all the comments.

If you want to add, remove, or extract pages from a PDF file, the tool offers those features as well. Open a PDF file, and then click on the Pages menu, and you have all those options. You can choose to add PDF after a particular page, first page, or last page. Once you are done with adding and remove pages, you can reorder them to what fits best.

Since the software is almost offering a versioning feature, you can choose the level of security for the document. Once you select the security level (Acrobat 3 to Acrobat 7), go ahead and set up password protection for the document. Along with this, you can add username, choose the level of editing, control print quality, copying extracting content, unlocking locked objects, and so on.

Download Ashampoo PDF Free from the official website.