Deciding when to call who has won an election can be a complex process for news organizations.

Timothy Kiska is an associate professor at University of Michigan-Dearborn and he has been calling elections since 1974.

This year, Kiska is calling who won the presidential election in Michigan for The Detroit Free Press.

"I get a sample of 80 precincts, and it’s almost like a miniature mathematical problem within the state," Kiska said. "(I) send people out to each of these precincts, they get there right before 8, and then right after 8 or whenever they get the results off the machine, they call me and I feed it into a data bank."

Like a great magician or chef, Kiska wants to retain some of the secrecy surrounding his craft.

"I don’t want to give away the secret sauce, but it’s a combination of using voter turnout from the last similar election, in this case it will be 2012, plus there’s a random factor in this," Kiska said.

Since the process is random, every precinct in the state of Michigan has a chance to be chosen, Kiska said.

Elections are not always called based on the hard numbers.

"Some news organizations like to call races based on exit polling," Kyle Melinn, editor of the political news site MIRS, said.

Exit polling is when voters who are leaving the precinct are asked to fill out a questionnaire about who they voted for, Kiska said.

"Exit polls are pretty good, but they tend to have a Democratic bias," Kiska said. "The reason being, younger people tend to vote more Democratic and (are) more likely to fill out an exit poll or a questionnaire as opposed to a crotchety old guy like myself, maybe on his way to work."

In the 2014 Michigan gubernatorial election, after the polls closed, the Detroit Free Press published that Rick Snyder won, purely based on exit polls. Snyder won, but only by four percent of the votes, Melinn said.

"I thought (that) was a gutsy thing to do," Melinn said. "It was pretty close, and I wasn’t comfortable calling it until kind of later in the night because the results were that close."

With the heavy spotlight of the elections shining down on them, it is essential that news organizations call the election correctly.

Kiska referenced the 1948 election when the Chicago Daily Tribune, now the Chicago Tribune, published an incorrect article and said Thomas Dewey had defeated Harry Truman for president.

"If that happens, that has really serious consequences to a news organization's credibility," Kiska said.

Political theory and constitutional democracy junior Kathryn Smith agreed.

“I would think (that news organization is) not as reliable,” Smith said.

Hospitality business junior Ryan Bragg said if a news organization called an election wrong, it would not impact his perception of them.

"They’d look goofy, but I wouldn’t stop reading it," Bragg said.

Calling an election purely by luck is also dangerous, Melinn said.

"I think it’s also dangerous to get it right by being lucky, Fool A can call Trump and Fool B can call Clinton, and one of the fools is going to get it right, but they’re still fools,” Melinn said.

It is easy to lose credibility if a mistake is made.

"I’ve been doing this since 1974, and if I’m dead wrong on something, I’m through, I’m toast," Kiska said. "If you get it wrong, it’s just awful, just awful.”