How Election Night Race Calls Will Work on Tuesday - and Why Some Winners Are Named in Minutes
When Texas polls close at 7 p.m. CT on Tuesday, the winners Houston sees on screen will come from a system built on two vote counters, thousands of reporters at county offices, and one strict rule: a race is called only when the trailing candidate cannot catch up. Reuters explains how - and why calls are sometimes taken back.
HOUSTON - Long before the last ballot in Harris County is counted on Tuesday night, winners will start appearing on television screens across Houston. Those calls will not come from the county, and they will not wait for a final tally. Reuters, in an explainer published ahead of the midterms, describes the system behind them: most television networks and digital outlets rely on two providers for vote counts - the Associated Press or the election-data firm Decision Desk HQ.
The AP is the older institution by far. A nonprofit newsroom supported by member newspapers, it has counted votes in every U.S. election since 1848, and for the 2026 midterms it said it will deploy more than 4,000 reporters at county election offices and polling locations, feeding data to the decision desks at ABC News, CBS News, Fox, CNN and NBC News. Its rule is conservative and simple to state: the AP uses vote totals and estimates how many votes remain uncounted from past voting patterns and early-vote data, and it calls a race only when the trailing candidate cannot catch up. The Wall Street Journal and MS NOW rely solely on AP calls; Fox News and CBS News make their own projections, applying their own analysis, exit polls and modeling to the AP count.
Decision Desk HQ works from official state sources - usually secretaries of state or state election departments - using automated software that repeatedly checks official election websites alongside reporters on the ground; it says roughly 80 percent of votes are processed by pulling data directly from official sites or monitoring them manually. Its final projections require unanimous team agreement and a sign-off from its head of data science, Scott Tranter, who told Reuters, 'We're preparing to have several thousand people working on election night to gather data.' Its clients include NewsNation, The Hill, Newsmax and X.
The first calls on Tuesday will start soon after polls close in Indiana and Kentucky at 5 p.m. CT, with Georgia, South Carolina, Vermont and Virginia an hour later; some races may be called instantly where most voting already happened early. Trust is the system's weak point - an October poll for the Medill Local News Initiative and the Alliance for Trust in Media found more than 60 percent of Americans have some confidence in news organizations to report accurate results, but only 32 percent have high confidence. And calls can be wrong: DDHQ withdrew a projection in Seattle's 2025 mayor's race and another in a New Jersey special-election primary this year, and the AP retracted a 2018 California House call when the trailing candidate took the lead. Houston readers watching Texas's close Senate and governor's races on Tuesday should expect the same discipline - fast calls where the math is settled, and long waits where it is not.
