How The Inquirer is reporting the results of the 2024 general election

Whether you’re excited, nervous, or a combination of the two, The Inquirer’s mission for this election 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 Nov. 5 general election, which includes races for president, U.S. Senate and House, state attorney general, other row offices, and Pennsylvania General Assembly seats.

The Inquirer’s various results pages are 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 on 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 Associated Press 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,” AP says in its guide to its process.

The Associated Press said it plans to call the winners for these races:

It’s important to remember that race calls are unofficial declarations from news organizations. That doesn’t make them unreliable — 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. Certification deadlines vary from state-to-state.

More than a million Pennsylvania voters have cast their vote via a mail-in ballot. 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.

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 the expected turnout. That gives a sense of how far along in the vote count we are.

Those expected turnout estimates come from AP, and those can 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.

» READ MORE: Why The Inquirer uses expected turnout to display election results

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 Associated Press 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.