How The Inquirer is reporting the results of Pennsylvania’s 2024 primary election

Though Tuesday’s presidential primary is a foregone conclusion with former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden having already secured their parties’ nominations, Pennsylvania voters will still decide nominees for several key state and congressional races.

The Inquirer’s mission in 2024 is what it has always been: to provide the most accurate and up-to-date information as possible. That includes letting you know when a race has been called by The Associated Press; providing the latest vote counts, along with contextual information to help understand those numbers; explaining the vote count as it occurs; and covering any developments that arise.

Here are some key things to know about how we’re reporting the results of the April 23 primary election, that includes primaries for President, U.S. Senate and House, State Attorney General, row offices and state General Assembly seats.

The Inquirer’s results page is powered by data from the Associated Press. Those numbers are usually updated right after county election offices, which oversee counting, release new vote totals to its website.

Results for races across the state, including the presidential primary, are compiled by the AP through a combination of methods, including having workers across the state calling in county election results as they come in.

Elections are run by counties, which then report results to the Pennsylvania Department of State throughout the night. The state displays those results on its unofficial election returns page, but that feed often lags behind the real-time vote count in many counties. Philadelphia, for example, reports its vote totals on its own page, which is usually far ahead of the state’s compilation.

To call races, The Inquirer relies primarily on the AP, which has a long track record of accurately declaring winners in even the closest of elections.

Those race calls aren’t a projection of a likely outcome. The AP only declares a winner when it’s clear a candidate has won.

“If our race callers cannot definitively say a candidate has won, we do not engage in speculation,” the AP says in its guide to its process.

The AP said it plans to call the primary winners for these races:

For the race on the Philadelphia ballot that the AP does not call — the ballot question — The Inquirer will declare a winner only if it is certain of that result, based on on-the-ground reporting of the vote count and reporters’ and editors’ analysis of the voting patterns. When the result is still uncertain, our goal is to report on the results and contextualize them so readers can make sense of the numbers.

It’s important to remember that race calls are unofficial declarations from news organizations. That doesn’t make them unreliable — the AP was 100% accurate in calling the presidential and congressional races in every state in 2020. It just means the final official result takes time.

Votes always take time to count, which is why Pennsylvania’s vote certification doesn’t occur until 20 days after Election Day.

Pennsylvania has far fewer mail ballots than in 2020, and the vote count should be significantly faster. Most votes cast this election should be counted within a few hours of polls closing. That’s partly because most votes will be cast in person, with those results reported on election night. Elections workers will begin counting mail ballots at 7 a.m., when state law allows them to start, and run their vote counts around the clock until they’re done.

The use of electronic poll books will also speed up the count.

But a small number of votes won’t be counted for days.

There will be a number of paper ballots that have to be manually adjudicated, with county elections boards deciding what to do with them. In the past, for example, officials have had to decide what to do with ballots that voters returned to the wrong county.

There are also always some votes that need to be counted by hand because of issues with the ballots themselves, such as having stray marks or coffee stains on them. There are provisional ballots, too, which counties can’t start counting until Friday.

And overseas and military ballots can arrive up to one week after Election Day if they’re postmarked in time.

When we present election results, you’ll see a percentage of expected votes that have been reported. That gives a sense of how far along in the vote count we are.

Those expected vote counts come from the AP, and those estimates change throughout the night. They become more accurate as votes are counted, giving a clearer and clearer picture of how much is left. The numbers will shift, going up or down as the expected vote count is adjusted.

That doesn’t mean something nefarious is going on — it just means the AP is updating its estimate to reflect new information. If the percentage of expected votes counted suddenly goes down, for example, all that means is the AP has increased its estimated vote total.

We use that expected vote number to present each candidate’s vote share. So in the first moments after polls close, if only 1% of the expected votes are in, we won’t say that a candidate has won 50% of the vote so far — that would be misleading. Instead, we’ll tell you the candidate has won 0.5% of the expected vote so far.

One thing you won’t see: the term “precincts reporting.” In the past, when 95% or so of Pennsylvania’s votes were cast in person, knowing how many precincts had reported their in-person results was a handy way of knowing where the count stood. Now that a significant portion of votes are cast by mail, we’re using the expected vote count instead.

Correction: This story was updated to clarify that the AP’s numbers come from county election offices.