--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Tuesday, November 5th, Election Day. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On today's show, an election guide with everything you need to know as you watch results roll in. Let's start with the question that every American wants to know. When will we know who won this election?
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, depending on how old you are, you might be used to the idea of waking up on Wednesday morning to election results. That was the case in 2008 and 2012 when Barack Obama won and in 2016 when Donald Trump won. But in 2020, it took until the Saturday after Election Day for it to get called for Joe Biden.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And in all of those cases, it's not like some formal federal agency made that declaration. It was media organizations. A lot of them, including Apple News, rely on specifically the Associated Press to make the calls.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So we called up David Scott. He's the editor in charge of the decision desk at the Associated Press. And we asked him, what do you at the AP watch on election night?
--:-- David Scott: There's no national single commission or agency that adds up all those votes and says who's won nationwide, unlike in many other Western-style democracies.
--:-- David Scott: So you can have something as complicated or sophisticated as a state sending out their vote totals from the elections taking place in their state via a programmatic feed. And something as simple as a picture of vote results written on a whiteboard posted to a Facebook page.
--:-- David Scott: The AP has closely monitored our patchwork system of election reporting for almost 200 years since the election of President Zachary Taylor.
--:-- David Scott: And it's developed its own system to determine when a race, from the presidential to congressional seats down to local races, can be called with 100 percent confidence.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We asked Scott how exactly they make that call.
--:-- David Scott: When we are declaring a winner in a race, we're trying to answer one question. Can the trailing candidates catch the leader?
--:-- David Scott: And so to do that, we are looking at every available piece of information about a race. And of course, at the heart of it is the vote count, what the voters have decided and what local election officials are reporting.
--:-- David Scott: But we can supplement that with our survey of the electorate, AP VoteCast. We can look at advanced vote statistics. We can look at registration data that allows us to look at how a race is developing and assess whether those trailing candidates have a path to victory.
--:-- David Scott: This year, the AP is prepared to call around 6,800 races. They're pulling in data from counties and states, but they've also got something like 4,000 people stationed all over the country who phone in results manually.
--:-- David Scott: It's a massive undertaking, one the AP calls the single largest act of journalism that exists.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, like I mentioned, a lot of media organizations rely on the AP, including the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR and us here at Apple News.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Some media organizations also rely on another service known as Edison Research to call races. And other news organizations have their own decision desks that pull data from a bunch of services like Fox News.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In 2020 you might remember, they were the first to call Arizona for Joe Biden. The AP followed shortly after, and it took other media outlets days to make the same call.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Fox got a lot of blowback from Trump for that call, but it turned out they and the AP were right.
--:-- David Scott: The AP has an incredible track record of accuracy, more than 99.9 percent.
--:-- David Scott: It's so careful about making calls that in 2000, in the contested race between Al Gore and George W. Bush, the AP never made a call, even as TV networks declared a winner and flailed around before the election ultimately went to the Supreme Court to decide.
--:-- Shamita Basu: As for why it took so long to call the 2020 election about four days, it came down to two factors. One, the pandemic changed how we vote and the surge of mail-in ballots that year took longer to count.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And the race was extraordinarily close in a handful of states, coming down to just thousands of votes in some.
--:-- David Scott: Scott said this year it could take longer than usual again.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And that's OK. Like, it's not a sign of fraud. It's not a sign of malfeasance, not a sign of anything going wrong. It is simply that we have a remarkably close election.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Most election observers believe this race will come down to seven battleground states. Georgia's polls close first at 7 p.m. Eastern, then North Carolina at 7.30 p.m.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If Kamala Harris does well in those states, that might be a sign that winning all the blue wall states will not be necessary. That's Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But if Trump does well in North Carolina and Georgia, then the blue wall will matter more. And those votes, because of the way they're tallied in those states, will take longer to count.
--:-- David Scott: So Scott says, try to be patient and just know that whether it takes hours or days, our democratic systems are normal and healthy.
--:-- David Scott: Let our wonderful election officials nationwide do their work of counting ballots. And it's really an amazing thing that they do.
--:-- David Scott: If we think about 160 million votes, the vast majority of them, almost all of them cast on paper, marked with a pen. And within a couple of days, we know who will be in the next Congress and who will be in the White House.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's really a remarkable thing that we do as a country and that they do as election officials.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let's turn now to what happens after the race has been called. Because it's one thing for news organizations to declare a winner. It's another thing to officially certify the results.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We are used to, as voters, seeing the election called on election night on our favorite network and just assuming that the election is over.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But those are not official results, and the results don't become official for a really long time.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That Jessica Hoosman. She the editorial director of VoteBeat a nonprofit and nonpartisan news outlet I recently spoke with her for an episode of Apple News In Conversation.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And she explained the official deadline for states to submit their certified counts is called Safe Harbor Day in early December.
--:-- Jessica Hoosman: And the biggest thing that could disrupt the certification process is lawsuits.
--:-- Jessica Hoosman: We saw this back in 2020, when former President Trump and his allies filed dozens of lawsuits in battleground states, 62 to be exact.
--:-- Jessica Hoosman: By the time Safe Harbor Day rolled around that December, only one state, Wisconsin, had not certified.
--:-- Jessica Hoosman: But President Joe Biden was already leading by a comfortable margin.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This time around, secretaries of state have had time to prepare for these kinds of legal challenges. Certification is required by law.
--:-- Jessica Hoosman: And certification delays a number of things, right? Like if certification is delayed, local candidates can't take office.
--:-- Jessica Hoosman: And so local candidates and local voters then have legal grounds to file a lawsuit against these people as well.
--:-- Jessica Hoosman: And so I think that secretaries of state in Arizona, in Georgia, in Michigan are way more prepared for this fight than they were in 2020.
--:-- Jessica Hoosman: And so I've talked to secretaries of state who are like, yeah, no, we're not worried about this at all.
--:-- Jessica Hoosman: We have already found a voter in every single county who is willing to be a plaintiff in the lawsuit, and that lawsuit is written.
--:-- Jessica Hoosman: And so as soon as they've refused to certify, we're filing it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Still, everyone is braced for some kind of heated legal battle to play out.
--:-- Shamita Basu: CNN's chief legal affairs correspondent Paula Reid said both campaigns have set up teams of lawyers, particularly in battleground states that could be heavily contested.
--:-- Paula Reid: 2024 is going to be the most litigated presidential election in history.
--:-- Paula Reid: Courts have already been flooded with lawsuits, primarily from Republican-aligned groups.
--:-- Paula Reid: And these suits came much earlier in the election cycle.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Sources tell me that Republicans learned in 2020 that they need to get out ahead of these questions, try to get these things litigated and resolved before Election Day.
--:-- Paula Reid: The Trump team, they knew that after 2020, their number one priority needed to be finding top legal talent.
--:-- Paula Reid: Because what happened in 2020 is not only did they lose 61 out of 62 cases, but some of their lawyers were sanctioned. Some of them were even criminally charged.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Republican strategy has been to challenge and change various state election laws, like voter qualifications, as part of what they call an election integrity operation.
--:-- Paula Reid: But Reid says a lot of those challenges are baseless.
--:-- Paula Reid: You have the former president getting out and making some false claims. For example, in Pennsylvania, he alleged that there was already fraud occurring in the state when there isn't actually evidence of that.
--:-- Paula Reid: That we do know they're investigating fraud. But filing those kinds of arguments in the court of public opinion helps to sow doubt and confusion about whatever happens, for example, in Pennsylvania.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Democratic strategy has been to double down on lawyers who have specialized knowledge in election law and procedures in each jurisdiction.
--:-- Jessica Hoosman: Now, experts say they aren't worried that any of these lawsuits will actually change the outcome of the election, but they do worry that they will sow more distrust among voters, especially if Trump keeps claiming without evidence that there is fraud.
--:-- Jessica Hoosman: Hoosman says the only way back from this is for Trump and his allies to change their message Republicans are going to have to cool it right.
--:-- Jessica Hoosman: Like they going to have to start talking about the system in realistic terms.
--:-- Jessica Hoosman: And I think that there is a faction of the Republican Party that is getting there.
--:-- Jessica Hoosman: And I say that because you can only say the system is so flawed that the results don't matter so many times before people are like, OK, well, I'm just not going to vote then.
--:-- Jessica Hoosman: What's the point? And so they're disenfranchising themselves when they do this stuff.
--:-- Jessica Hoosman: And I think it's going to take a really long time for the Republican Party to undo that damage.
--:-- Jessica Hoosman: And I will be interested to see how different the message is on voting if Donald Trump loses this election.
--:-- Jessica Hoosman: Like, what does election integrity look like in a post-Trump era for the Republican Party?
--:-- Jessica Hoosman: And I don't know, right? I really don't know.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Before we let you go, a few other election stories being featured in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's easy to forget this because you might be pumped about heading to the polls while wearing your pro-whoever t-shirt or hat, but USA Today has a good list of reminders about what you can and can't wear to the polls.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In some states, wearing campaign apparel to the polls counts as electioneering or an attempt to convince other people to vote a certain way.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So you're better off leaving anything with a candidate's name or slogan at home.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Next, there is one county in Washington state that has correctly predicted who wins the White House in every election since 1980.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Voters in Washington state don't register by party, So it's hard to know the political makeup of Clallam County.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Voters there who spoke to the LA Times have strong opinions about whether they're supporting Harris or Trump.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But Clallam's history of breaking six times for Republicans and five for Democrats demonstrates that partisan labels aren't everything.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And lastly, an education story.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We are living through a truly historic election cycle. And yet history teachers in schools are, for the most part, reluctant to talk about it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In the past, many teachers have used election years as an opportunity to explain the American political process to their students.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But The Wall Street Journal reports on how some educators have opted out this year, skipping mock elections and debate watch parties.
--:-- Shamita Basu: With close to 20 states having put policies in place related to how schools can teach certain topics, some teachers told the journal they're unsure how to proceed.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But others say they're finding it important to teach their students how to disagree respectfully, to listen and repeat someone else's views before sharing their own, and to think critically about the news they're seeing online.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And if you're listening in the News app right now, stick around for the rest of my conversation with Jessica Hoosman about how elections get certified.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That episode of Apple News in Conversation is coming up next.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And whether we have a called race or not. I will be back with the news tomorrow.
