You wouldn't know it from watching television, but the Internet has already shaken up this year's presidential race. It's not fund raising (though that's certainly been goosed by the Net), and it's not Net voting (still in a testing phase). Rather, it's the widespread availability of exit-poll data—which shows who's winning and who's losing—while voters are still voting. Already, a storm of heated debate and threatened lawsuits has erupted over the data's release.

The storm reached a crescendo this week. Like Slate did in late February, National Review Online bowed to legal pressure and chose not to post the statistics before polls closed on Super Tuesday. Within hours, the Drudge Report leapt into the void, putting the numbers out there for all to see.

Exit polls are the Rosetta stone of modern political analysis: They provide the fullest picture of the motivations and demographic fault lines of the American electorate. They are also, when properly read, remarkably accurate barometers of who will win, which makes them of intense interest to political and media insiders on the afternoon of an important election.

Theoretically, any organization can take exit polls, but in recent years, a single company—Voter News Service—has provided the service for the American media. The company's board of managers includes the three major networks, Fox News, CNN, and the Associated Press; its subscribers include major newspapers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. (Published reports indicate that there are more than a hundred VNS subscribers. A VNS spokeswoman declined to say how many subscribers the organization has or what subscriptions cost.)

Typically, VNS makes data available under embargo to subscribers in several waves, starting in the early afternoon on an important election day. The early numbers allow media organizations to plan their next-day coverage (by interviewing members of key demographic groups, for example). But the numbers are a prized commodity among interested parties.

To say that VNS is protective of its information monopoly is an understatement. (It's even protective of the phrase "exit poll." VNS has reserved the domain name Exitpoll.com but does not produce a site there.) So are its members: Fox News President Roger Ailes essentially has threatened to fire any employee caught leaking, or even characterizing, VNS numbers to outsiders.

It was not terribly surprising, then, that right after the Feb. 1 New Hampshire primary, VNS attorneys began demanding that Slate Deputy Editor Jack Shafer stop publishing the exit-poll information that other journalists leaked to him. Slate continued to publish the information for the South Carolina and Michigan primaries, but by the Virginia primary Feb. 29, Slate's editorial staff succumbed to the dictates of its attorneys and withheld the data. (See Shafer's "Press Box" columns on exit polls, here, here, here, here, and here.)

At that point, National Review got into the game. The conservative magazine's Web site published the Virginia data on the afternoon of Feb. 29 and let it be known that it planned to publish the numbers for 13 contests on Super Tuesday, March 7. On March 6, however, National Review received a letter from Robert Penchina, an attorney representing VNS, demanding that the site "immediately cease any and all conduct misappropriating VNS' property or infringing VNS' rights."

After considerable internal discussion, National Review decided not to publish the numbers again. National Review Web editor Jonah Goldberg said he was "kind of bummed" about the magazine's choice, which he described as "essentially a business decision." The Review simply did not have the resources for a legal fight. "Journalistically, we think we're in the right," Goldberg says. "But we're not an operation that can handle even a frivolous lawsuit."

It's disturbing that a threatened lawsuit can keep two established publications from publishing information—especially when a conglomerate of media companies is making the threats. But that's where a very useful Matt Drudge came in. At about 1 p.m. PT March 7, the Drudge Report site posted a headline declaring Bush the winner in nine out of the 12 contests; it followed up a few minutes later with a state-by-state breakdown of numbers.