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Facing a results vacuum that could grind for weeks, US television networks are preparing to fill the airwaves against a backdrop of unprecedented pressure to avoid mistakes and a torrent of misinformation.

In 2020, it took four tense days for President Joe Biden’s victory to be announced.

This year, pundits and observers will once again wait for the puzzle of states to be declared one by one to Democrats or Republicans, and with them their Electoral College votes, 270 of which are needed to win.

“It’s going to come down to seven really competitive swing states, and in many of those states, we won’t have enough data to make a projection until late that evening, early the next day, or in some cases, we might be a few days after the election,” said Joe Lenski, executive vice president of Edison Research.

His organization will produce polls, projections and vote counts for the ABC, CBS, NBC News and CNN networks.

In addition to a complex electoral system, voting and counting procedures differ between regions.

Lenski points to Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, two key swing states that don’t begin counting early votes until Election Day on Nov. 5.

With no official results for weeks, it’s up to the TV news networks to call the states for either former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris.

Behind the swish TV studios, the real pressure won’t be on the anchors and pundits, but on the network’s decision offices, the teams of statisticians and analysts who will feed the anchors with estimates based on erratic early results.

“The stakes are very high … there is huge pressure to capture viewers by giving them information as quickly as it’s available, but the biggest risk is sacrificing accuracy for speed,” said Costas Panagopoulos, professor of political science at the University Northeastern and former NBC decision desk member.

On November 3, 2020, just hours after the polls closed, America’s most popular conservative channel, Fox News, dealt a body blow to Trump’s chances by calling Arizona for Biden.

The announcement, confirmed days later by other media outlets, angered Trump’s camp.

Perhaps the most notorious was the U-turn networks made in 2000 after Florida was prematurely called for Democratic challenger Al Gore.

To avoid a repeat of the credibility-damaging episode, the media is relying on more advanced analysis, which will use not only exit polls, but also surveys of anticipated voters.

Election lawyer Ben Ginsberg said he expects the 2020 “red mirage,” the apparent Republican lead that disappeared as mail-in ballots popular among Democrats were added to the tally.

“(What is) still unclear is whether a Republican push this year to get their constituents to vote early will change that pattern,” Ginsberg added in an op-ed in The New York Times.

During the marathon race to a result, channels will struggle to maintain their viewership while trying to maintain accuracy and transparency against an expected wave of misinformation about alleged election fraud.

CNN will resume its “magic wall,” allowing its chief national correspondent, John King, to display trends visually, showing off his encyclopedic knowledge of past votes.

NBC News has published several articles detailing how data will be collected from more than 100,000 polling places starting November 5th.

They also detailed the precautions that will be taken to accurately project the results of 610 polls, including the Senate and House of Representatives elections.

“The amount of data that our partner news organizations are delivering to their viewers … is more data than (has) ever been delivered before. There’s more detail, there’s more maps, there’s more analysis than ever before,” Lenski said.

“Delays in themselves are not evidence of a conspiracy,” Ginsberg wrote in his column.

“If either candidate jumps the gun and declares victory before the votes are counted, reject it as political posturing.”