ORLANDO, Fla. – When the polls close at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 5, the count begins in Florida.
Election workers, who have already pre-processed early voting ballots and vote-by-mail ballots, will begin loading those results on election websites around the state.
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Workers will also have to process any leftover vote-by-mail ballots, and load results from Election Day polling precincts.
As those results roll in, you’ll start seeing them on WKMG’s news platforms, like News 6, News 6+ and ClickOrlando.com. And we will begin to call winners, too.
There are more than 260 races we will be watching on Election Night, ranging from the presidential race to city charter amendments.
“We rely on The Associated Press or AP to call federal and state races,” News 6 General Manager Jeff Hoffman said. “WKMG will call county and city races when the results are in.”
Here is how that works.
[RESULTS 2024: Complete Coverage | Voter Guide for the Nov. 5 election | How your vote gets counted and verified]
Local races
News 6 gets its city and county race data directly from the county election supervisors. We manually input the latest results into our system.
We will not call a race until we know all the results have been processed by the county, including early voting, vote-by-mail and Election Day data. Once we know all data is in, we will declare a winner in a race, if a winner can be called. Some races may be too close to call. Either way, our planning producer, who has been calling races for News 6 for years, will make the determination.
Our planning producer will also make the call for judicial retention races. The results of these races will be determined by the results posted on the Florida Division of Elections website.
“We will report the results accurately and in real-time. Our guiding principle is accuracy, not speed. It is more important to us that we be accurate rather than first to call a race,” Hoffman said.
Results for most Central Florida races will start to come in after 7 p.m. Eastern on Election Night. But for statewide races, such as the constitutional amendments, the U.S. Senate and the presidential race, we may not see results until after 8 p.m. Eastern. This is because the western part of the panhandle is in the Central Time Zone, so the polls in those counties close an hour after the rest of the state.
Federal and state races
Federal and state races very often involve data from more than one county. For accuracy, we rely on the Associated Press to call these races. The AP provides a non-partisan source for election information, with a commitment to accuracy and independence. The AP has been calling elections since 1848.
The AP uses trained race callers who specialize in understanding the electorate at the state, county and congressional district levels, as well as the election rules for each state.
To do this, AP looks at the vote count, along with data on voter registration, votes already cast early or by mail, election rules and data from past elections. This all comes from AP’s Election Research Team, which also estimates how many ballots are left to be counted, and whether there are enough for an opponent to catch up.
The AP also uses a wide-ranging survey of voters called AP VoteCast as a factor in calling races.
All of this is taken into account once the polls close. This is why sometimes AP can call a race right after the polls close but sometimes it takes hours — maybe even days. Like us, AP does not call a race until they are certain there is no chance a candidate trailing behind a leader will catch up.
However, News 6 reserves the right to hold off on announcing a winner in a state or federal race if we feel something about the results doesn’t add up. In that instance, our managers will work with AP and election officials to make sure we have an accurate result.
You can learn more about how AP calls race results by heading to the AP website.
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