What You Need to Know About The Times’s 2026 Election Results and the Needle Here’s how we bring you the latest vote totals and estimates of the outcome on political races around the country.

Overview As polls close in the 2026 midterm elections and vote counting gets underway, it’s important to stick to trusted sources and to understand the process and the facts. In the early hours of election night, the results posted to The New York Times’s website and elsewhere represent an unofficial running tally and are therefore incomplete. The Times also includes an estimate of outstanding votes to give readers a sense of how many remain to be counted.

The most definitive moment on election night is when a race is called. The Times relies on The Associated Press for most of its race calls, and may make some calls of its own. A race call happens when there is no viable path to victory for the trailing candidate.

While waiting for those calls, The Times produces a series of election forecasts, sometimes represented by the Needle, which account for the outstanding vote and the likelihood of either candidate’s victory.

In almost every instance, the vote totals reported early in the night are accurate. But on very rare occasions, mistakes happen. If small changes in results appear on election night, they are likely to stem from administrative errors. Times reporters and editors work to understand any anomalies. Partisan actors on social media, on the other hand, may try to exploit errors to back up their claims about election integrity.

It’s also important to remember that counting votes is a lengthy process and sometimes leads to delayed results. A late update from a city or county is not evidence of foul play; it is nearly always the consequence of the time it takes to verify, tally and report results.

States that take longer to count votes, such as Alaska, Maine and California, could dominate the conversation in the days after the election, especially with the balance of power in both chambers of Congress at stake.

President Trump and some of his allies have aggressively questioned the integrity of the country’s voting system, but the reality is that U.S. elections are very decentralized and are typically run by counties or even cities and towns. That structure makes it difficult to disrupt the elections on a mass scale and helps protect the voting process.

Similarly, voter fraud in the United States is exceptionally rare. Recent investigations into fraud — especially those targeting noncitizen voters — have found no widespread illegal voting.

The Needle Results Our live results are provided by The Associated Press. To produce its results, The A.P. combines data feeds from state and county websites with on-the-ground reporting by thousands of correspondents who gather vote tallies from county clerks and other local officials after polls close. The Times has also occasionally published data from other results providers.

When The A.P. gets reports from states, it checks the vote totals for potential inconsistencies or errors. Then it sends the updated data to The Times and other customers about every one to three minutes. Calls projecting winners are sent immediately.

Not every news organization gets its election results from The A.P., as The Times does. Some use another election results provider, Decision Desk HQ. State or local election officials often display their own results as well.

These sources can have different counts on election night, depending on the speed and scope of their reporting on a particular race. The results from all providers may not match until all the votes are counted.

Here’s an example of how we visualize remaining votes to be counted on our results pages. In 2022, The Times began publishing its own estimates for the number of remaining votes. Early in the night, these estimates are based on our pre-election expectations for the eventual turnout, based on prior elections and early voting data. Once The A.P. reports that a county has largely completed its count, we compare the reported vote with our expectations and gradually revise the anticipated eventual turnout.

For years, election results providers used the percentage of precincts reporting to help give readers a sense of how many votes remain to be counted. But the rise of mail-in voting and early voting has made that measure all but useless in many states, since absentee votes are usually not counted by precinct. (A precinct is the smallest level at which election results are reported. A precinct may be a few city blocks or an entire county.) We expect our estimates are better than the old “precincts reporting” metric, but they are still only estimates. They do not usually reflect official information on the number of remaining votes.

Accuracy County and state election officials are very clear that votes reported on election night are unofficial. Before final results are recorded, they take many steps to confirm and certify results.

As a result of the real-time nature of the election night feed of results, errors can be introduced temporarily. This is common. Vote counting and reporting is still a largely human process in many places, and it’s possible that zeros may be added, names of candidates may temporarily be switched or numbers may be typed incorrectly. These errors are frequently caught quickly and fixed within minutes. And all election results go through a final review before certification.

We have a team of journalists, statisticians, graphics editors, data experts and researchers monitoring data as it comes in, ranging from a couple dozen people for a small primary to nearly 100 for a general election. We also have automated checks that flag data if it is far outside our expectations, and in some cases will prevent it from appearing online before it has been reviewed for accuracy.

Because elections are so decentralized in the United States, we spend a lot of time talking to local officials so we can put all this data into the proper context. Each city, county and township is slightly different, staffed by local officials whose job is to make sure every vote is counted fairly. We consult with these officials to make sure we have the correct precinct maps and names, understand how they count votes, know what kinds of reports they produce and are familiar with the many other details that will come together on election night.

Maps The Times’s results pages often feature a map that is shaded different colors. This is known as a choropleth map. For primary races, counties are colored to represent the candidate who is leading in the vote tally there.

Choropleth maps are great for quickly understanding geographic patterns and identifying leaders in a specific county you care about. But because the geographic area of a county may not be in proportion to the number of voters living there, they are not always good at indicating the winner of an entire state.

That’s one reason The Times’s results pages also include another type of map that uses circles to show the size of the lead that the winning candidate has in each county.

These maps sometimes make it hard to see the results in counties where there are too few votes or where the vote is very close, but they are good at showing population centers where a large number of voters may have pushed a candidate into the overall lead.

Calling Winners News organizations can project a winner, even with no results, based on numerous criteria like a party having a long history of dominance in a state, a huge advantage in voter registration, and large leads in pre-election polling. In some cases, The Associated Press also relies on the results of its own pre-election survey, known as the Voter Poll, as an additional data point to help make decisions, though it will not make race calls solely on the basis of that survey.

Most major news media organizations wait until polls are closed statewide before calling a winner.

In virtually every race, we rely on The A.P.’s calls. It employs a team of analysts, researchers and race callers who have a deep understanding of the states where they declare winners.

In addition to overall vote totals, race callers pay attention to county-level votes, votes by type of ballot and where there are ballots left to count.

The A.P. describes its decision-making process as “aimed at determining the answer to a single question: Can the trailing candidates catch the leader?”And only when the answer is an unquestionable “no” will The A.P. call the race.

In a very small number of high-profile contests, The Times independently scrutinizes and evaluates A.P. race calls before making a projection.

In recent years, more and more Americans have cast their votes by mail rather than in person on Election Day. Often it takes extra time to count these mail-in ballots because of security procedures election officials must follow, such as verifying the signature on the ballot’s envelope. Each state has different rules for when mail-in ballots can be received and how soon they can be processed and tabulated. In close races, these ballots can make a difference.

This article was written by members of The Times’s Election Analytics team, including Irineo Cabreros, Nate Cohn, Lindsey Rogers Cook, Saurabh Datar, William P. Davis, Alex Lemonides, Ilana Marcus and Christine Zhang.