'It is a little analog': how the Associated Press calls election winners in the US (from The Guardian)
The way the US counts votes is unique. In fact, there is no one central vote-counting system but rather tens of thousands of them in local precincts all across the country.
To help determine who has won where, the Guardian and many other newsrooms rely on the Associated Press, which has been calling US elections since 1848. (Some television networks, such as CNN, use their own analysis of results to make race calls.)
“Two years after the AP was founded, in 1848, we decided that there needed to be a trustworthy, nonpartisan source of information about who the country had elected as its new leaders,” David Scott, vice-president and head of news strategy and operations at the AP, told the Guardian.
The AP’s process for monitoring election results has undergone a few updates in the past 176 years. This year, the AP will rely on 4,000 reporters to report vote totals.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/05/how-associated-press-calls-election-winners
[Informative Interview with David Scott at link]