There will be races this year that are so close that election officials will have to recount the votes to make sure they have the correct outcome, but a recount rarely changes the winner.

Voters today have some options in terms of how they vote and when they vote, and the main choices are voting in person at a polling place on Election Day, voting early in person before Election Day, or voting by mail.

Unlike many countries, U.S. elections are highly decentralized and include long lists of races. Elections for president and Congress all the way down to local offices are run by county, town and state election officials, not by any national election officials.

Explaining Election Day: How AP declares winners

Explaining Election Day: How the Electoral College works

The Associated Press has been counting the vote in US elections since 1848, and today it is one massive operation. Here’s how it works.

One question will be asked over and over again on election night: who won? The Associated Press will answer that question for nearly 7,000 races across the country and up and down the ballot. Here is how the AP declares winners in elections.

AP VoteCast is a comprehensive survey that tells you what’s on voters minds. It takes a detailed snapshot of the American electorate and really tells the story behind the election results.

Voting machines have been at the center of a web of conspiracy theories since the 2020 election, with false claims that they were manipulated to steal the presidency from Donald Trump.

Administering an election is a balancing act that requires tabulating and releasing results as fast as possible, making it easy for as many voters as possible to participate, and keeping elections secure and voters confident in the process.

Figuring out who won any election once voting has concluded essentially boils down to two fundamental questions: How many votes have been cast for each candidate so far and how many ballots still need to be counted.

Donald Trump and many local Republican elected officials say they want to count ballots by hand rather than trust machines to tabulate the vote. But hand-counting is actually more prone to error, delays results, and is labor intensive.

The 2024 presidential election is likely to be decided by a few thousand voters in a handful of states, just as the previous two presidential elections were. Here are the types of areas to find the voters who might decide the election

The U.S. general election this November will decide the country’s direction, but it is far from a nationally administered contest. Here’s a look at some notable caveats, edge cases, and oddities in certain states for the 2024 election.

Control of Congress and the White House hangs in the balance on Nov. 5, but don’t expect election night to be all nail-biters. Chances are some winners will be declared before a single vote has been tallied, just as the polls close in those states.

In 2021, the Associated Press reviewed every potential fraud case across the six battleground states where Trump disputed his loss. Fewer than 475 ballots came back as potentially fraudulent across all those states.

The U.S. military trained him in explosives and battlefield tactics. But after two tours in Iraq, Chris Arthur was calling for taking up arms against police and government officials in his own country. (AP video: Allen Breed, Serginho Roosblad, Rick Bowmer/ production: Serginho Roosblad, Marshall Ritzel)

After a long search for her birth family filled with many twists, Korean adoptee Rebecca Kimmel still doesn’t know who she is. But in the process, she arranged a reunion between a birth father and his twin daughters, who had been separated for decades. (Video: Lora Moftah and David Goldman/ Edited by Serginho Roosblad)

Companies are working to fill the organ shortage by engineering pigs to be more humanlike in hopes of xenotransplant clinical trials. See where those pigs are raised. (AP video/Shelby Lum)

There’s fine wine and now there’s “fine water,” a growing category worldwide — even in water-stressed countries like India. (Nov. 21) (AP Video: Martha Irvine/Dar Yasin,/Srdjan Nedeljkovic/Theodora Tongas)

Guillermo Barraza had already faced death threats for his work as a journalist in cartel-plagued Mexico. Now, he is risking even more by hosting a newscast in drag to shine a light on his community and the perils it faces. (Feb. 2)(AP video: Fernanda Pesce)

Oleksii Yukov says the same thing to all the Ukrainian mothers. He tells them to talk about their dead children, so they will be remembered. It is Yukov’s job to bring the dead home, one body at a time.

An Associated Press investigation into prison labor in the United States found that prisoners who are hurt or killed on the job are often being denied the rights and protections offered to other American workers. (AP video: Robert Bumsted, Eugene Garcia)

An investigation led by The Associated Press found at least 94 people died after they were given sedatives and restrained by police from 2012 through 2021. About half of the 94 who died were Black, including Demetrio Jackson. (AP Video: Shelby Lum)

Crib cameras are offering a clue to a rare but devastating tragedy -- when seemingly healthy young children suddenly die in their sleep and autopsies can’t tell why. (Jan. 4)(AP Video/Shelby Lum)

The waters around Antarctica are emerging as a battleground between industry and activists as advances in technology and new demand for krill as a dietary supplement drive more and more fishing of the shrimp-like crustacean. (Oct. 13) (AP video David Keyton/production: Marshall Ritzel)

The suicide of a young man from Guinea inside one of Italy’s migrant detention centers has shined a spotlight on the squalid, chaotic conditions. Lawyers and activists have described the centers as “black holes for human rights.” The Italian government says the de-facto jails are essential to deterring migrants from crossing the Mediterranean on smuggler’s boats. But for Ousmane Sylla, who developed mental health issues after leaving Guinea, they were unbearable. He killed himself in February, and his family blames the Italian government. (AP Video/Bram Janssen, Marshall Ritzel, Paolo Santalucia)

In the years after the 2001 U.S. invasion and the ouster of the Taliban regime, Associated Press photographer Rodrigo Abd spent months on assignment in Afghanistan and learned how to use a traditional Afghan “box camera,” a handmade camera and darkroom in one. Abd returned this year with an idea: to employ the nearly disappeared Afghan art form to document how life has changed in peacetime, for better and worse, two years after U.S. troops left and the Taliban returned to power. (Sept. 22) (AP video: Bram Janssen)

On August 14, 2023, fishermen found a Senegalese migrant boat, known as a pirogue, drifting in the Atlantic ocean. They were 290 km (180 miles) northeast of Cape Verde, the last cluster of islands in the eastern central Atlantic Ocean before the vast nothingness that separates West Africa from the Caribbean. For 38 men and boys, it was salvation. For the other 63 who had boarded this boat, it was too late.

Generations of U.S. Catholics are giving way to religious conservatives who believe the church has been twisted by change. It has reshaped parishes and universities across the country, leaving them sometimes at odds with much of the Catholic world. (AP Video/ Jessie Wardarski)

There’s been a nationwide expansion of maternity homes since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and Christian anti-abortion advocates want to open more of them to meet a growing need. But maternity homes have had a traumatic history. (AP Video: Jessie Wardarski)