To our clients and those who follow our projections,
As we finalize our preparations to bring you results and projections starting November 5 for more than 30,000 elections across the US, ranging from local school board seats to the US presidency, we want to thank you and reiterate our three-fold commitment:
- To independently decided results. As a decision desk for hire, our media clients range from liberal to conservative, local to national, start-up to legacy, and streamers to print, radio, broadcast and the web. In 2020, our client, The Bangor Daily News, was the first news outlet in the world to report Vice President Joe Biden’s election as President. On November 5, we will be providing results and projections to NewsNation and the Scripps local stations; Huffington Post and Newsmax; streamers like The Daily Wire, Bryan Tyler Cohen and Breaking Points; The Hill, Virginia Public Media, and The Bangor Daily News; among others. Our team, and only our team, decides our race calls. Every DDHQ client receives the same data and is required to represent it correctly.
- To rigorous accuracy. We don’t prioritize being first with a call – we prioritize accuracy, and our track record for accuracy matches that of our fellow providers. DDHQ launched in 2012 on a hunch that we could use technology effectively to improve the accuracy and speed of collecting and analyzing election returns, and went on to become the first provider to call the presidency for Donald Trump in 2016 and for Vice President Biden in 2020. In 2022, we were first to call control of Congress. In 2024, we may or may not be first with the biggest calls, but when we are, it will be because of both our pursuit of new approaches and our adherence to the strict process outlined below, which has helped us remain a leader in accurate race calls.
- To transparency. We deeply value information-sharing and transparency so the public knows they can trust our results. Most Americans don’t know the process by which the vote they each cast winds up represented in the Election Night tables and graphics they see on their TV or phone screen. The design of our democracy has meant that the real-time projection of the next President of the United States or control of the US Senate or House of Representatives gets handled by a small group of national news organizations (both for-profit and nonprofit), academic institutions and relatively small businesses.
DDHQ is a small business and technology start-up committed to helping to pull back the curtain on the process. Here is how we’ll be projecting the outcomes of all 30,000-plus US elections happening on November 5:
Our race projections reflect months of preparations to apply the data streams DDHQ collects from several thousand election authorities across the country. In the months leading up to an election, we continually refine our reporting workflow—between on-the-ground reporters, data scraping, and remote monitoring—to ensure the most accurate and reliable method for each individual election office. In addition to election night returns, we also collect absentee and early vote tallies.
On Election Night, the DDHQ Race Call Team considers a number of factors in making projections, including:
- How much of the vote is in/how much is still outstanding?
- Where is the incoming vote coming from, and where are the outstanding votes?
- What are the nature of the voters in both of those areas, and how do they correspond to the current state of returns?
- What types of votes are in (early, day-of, absentee), and what types are yet to be reported?
For our team to project an outcome, the data must meet expected and stringent benchmarks, and if it doesn’t, the call is held for further analysis. At least two of three members of our team – made up of academics and data scientists – along with DDHQ’s Director of Data Science must sign off before a projection is made. We will not call a race until these requirements are met. In addition, we deploy a model we developed, which has been peer-reviewed and published in the Harvard Data Science Review, to assist our team with their analysis.
Once our call team has analyzed these factors and the data and concluded that there are simply not enough outstanding votes for the trailing candidate to overcome their disadvantage, the projection is made.
There are often cases where a call cannot be made until all the votes are counted. This may be on Election Night, or even days or weeks later.
Our democratic election process depends upon data that is accurate and trustworthy. That’s why DDHQ works constantly to be the most accurate, transparent and comprehensive organization reporting election results.
Regardless of any real-time projections from any provider, either DDHQ or our peers, US elections are not officially decided until the relevant election officials have completed their mandated processes and certified the winners.
We have one job: to call every election accurately. Thank you for working with and following us.
Decision Desk HQ