How the Associated Press Counts Votes

The Associated Press has called America's elections since 1848. But this year will be unlike anything it's ever seen. Here's an inside view of the AP's massive vote-calling operation.

How the Associated Press Plans to Determine the Winner of This Year's Election Julie Pace has spent the last several weeks talking to journalists about their nightmares. She is the Washington bureau chief for the Associated Press, and the reporters in her care bring their Election Day fears to Pace. Woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat about mail-in ballots? Call Julie. Worried that President Trump will declare himself the winner before the votes are counted? Get Julie on the phone. "I have spent a lot of time trying to game out and brainstorm with people all of the nightmare scenarios that everybody has," she told me earlier this month. "I've become known in the bureau as the person to confess your nightmares to." The Associated Press has called U.S. elections since 1848, when it used a new technology, the telegraph, to declare Zachary Taylor the next president of the United States. In our lifetime, Election Day has pretty much gone like this: visit your local polling place, vote, flip on the TV around prime time, and watch the returns come in. By the time you go to bed, the media has declared a winner. While cable networks have their own teams of experts who compile data and project winners, they rely on the AP's reporting and data to cross-reference their work. And the AP supplies results to its subscribers, including The New York Times, Google, and myriad local newspapers. The general consensus is if the AP declares a winner, it must be true. So, how is the Associated Press planning to call a winner in this historic election, to ensure it gets this one right despite the unprecedented hurdles, because getting it wrong could spill the country into chaos? That's what I sought to find out. Read the Full Story Vote—But Not By Mail. Not After What Happened This Week. The combined forces of the "conservative" movement, which have taken control of the White House, Senate, and Supreme Court, will do anything in their power to steal the election. They got away with it in 2000, and that was without the fully formed bubble of unreality in which this entire enterprise—and the millions of everyday Americans who have pledged complete allegiance to it—now resides. It would be right in line with everything the Republican Party has done in recent years, because power is its own justification, the means and the end. This is top-to-bottom. When challenged, they say things like, "this is a republic, not a democracy," as if those terms are in contradiction. What they're really saying is that they used their power to entrench their power, and if you want power, you should get some power. Oh, and they're also saying, fuck you. The Democratic leadership in Congress, particularly the Senate, cannot be relied upon to prosecute this case or win the fight. This authoritarian scourge must be crushed at the ballot box with overwhelming force, and the best way to do that, at this point, is to vote early in person. If you have not yet mailed your ballot, don't put it in the mail. Drop it off wherever possible, and do it as soon as possible. Do not wait for them to take it away from you. Politics Editor Jack Holmes explains why things are moving very fast now. And why there is one chance left to put a stop to this.   Read the Full Story The MVP of Your Coffee Table Is Just a Few Clicks Away  We're talking, of course, about Esquire Magazine. Specifically, a whole year's worth of it. But by joining our new club, Esquire Select, you don't just get the magazine. You get Esquire at the speed of the internet, with unlimited access to Esquire.com. You get an edge in the form of political talking points, with unlimited access to The Politics Blog with Charles P. Pierce. You get a members-only, weekly email directly from the editors, curated by our editors and filled with the best stuff of the week. And you get access to our inner circle, meaning our friends are now your friends—and our deals and discounts are yours now, too. It's the best money you'll spend all year, and you get it all with an Esquire Select membership.  Read the Full Story 300 Job Applications Later, an Arkansas Teacher Laid Off in the Pandemic Is Losing Hope "The first thing I did was cancel all my little subscription things," Matt Breen told Esquire's Jack Holmes in an interview for our October/November issue. "That's about a hundred bucks a month, right? Give or take . . . then it was like, 'Okay, I'm not gonna get takeout anymore.' That was the second thing. Now I'm at the point where I'm like, 'All right, eat one meal a day—that could be okay.' When they spoke in late August, Breen had just submitted his three hundredth job application. He was laid off from his job at a new Catholic school in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in June. The school paid him a month's salary in severance, which helped. As soon as that ended, the full weight of everything fell on him: His unemployment insurance was based on his previous year's salary of $18,000. When the $600-a-week supplement Congress provided as part of the CARES Act expired at the end of July, that was a further blow. And now he's got less than a month left to receive any sort of help at all. He already cannot pay his student loans. He'll soon be unable to pay his rent. That's what led him to post his story on Reddit's r/Unemployment forum—which is where Holmes found him. Here, Breen tells his story, which serves as a reminder that he is not alone as millions of Americans continue to fight an unprecedented unemployment crisis.   Read the Full Story How Sean Connery, an Unlikely Choice to Play Bond, Defined 007's Style  James Bond's style was extremely precise, the spare but expensive, handmade wardrobe of a military man, not overtly fashionable but not fuddy-duddy, either. It met and exceeded accepted standards of dress while remaining deliberately unsensational. Fashion in all its preening frivolity was always reserved for Bond's vain, egotistical nemeses like Goldfinger, Blofeld, or Largo. As a recipe for worry-free style, Sean Connery's Bond defined and still defines the clean-cut ideal of a wardrobe that transcends fashion and becomes eternal. In the end it was a cocktail: Connery's suave style with his own rough edges poking through that gave Bond his bite. It resonated with the socially and geographically expanding world of the 1960s; Connery was a forerunner of a whole generation of working-class British actors made good—like Michael Caine and Terence Stamp—who personified a rougher and racier sexuality on screen. Creative Director Nick Sullivan explains how, in clothing terms, Connery's Bond gave all young man an easily referenced visual encyclopedia of how to dress well without ever overdoing it. Read the Full Story Exclusive: A Shocking New Story from Stephen King In his latest piece of fiction, "On Slide Inn Road," Stephen King, one of the greatest living storytellers, applies his masterful skills to the story of a family that takes the scenic route. Everything goes terribly wrong when their tire gets stuck in the mud. It's classic King—tense, terrifying, and unexpected. And you can only read "On Slide Inn Road" in Esquire. The story appears in our latest issue, which is currently on newsstands. 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