What Are Exit Polls?
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2000, at 4:33 PM ETLittle gnomes somewhere are tabulating exit poll data and so will know the result of the presidential election before Americans finish voting. What are exit polls?
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StumbleUponExit polls are questionnaires that people are asked to fill out after they leave their polling place. These "ballots" are about 30 questions long and ask everything from age and sex to who people voted for and why. Voters fill out the questionnaires themselves and deposit them in boxes, so their answers, like their actual ballots, are secret. Exit polls are conducted across the country by Voter News Service, a consortium of the television networks ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, and NBC, and the Associated Press. Today they will collect about 70,000 questionnaires from around the country. As the results are tabulated, VNS will be able to project winners of the presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial races. Since 1980, when they were first used to predict a presidential race, they have been overwhelmingly accurate.
In elections where the exit polls are widely in favor of one candidate, VNS is able to call the winner on the basis of that alone. In somewhat closer elections, exit poll data is combined with actual results from sample precincts to project a winner before all the votes are tallied. In races closer than that, VNS adds results from counties to say who won. And if it's really, really, really close, even VNS has to wait for almost all the votes to be counted. This doesn't mean that you will know when VNS knows. Since the 1980s politicians from Western states and others have denounced the practice of declaring winners before all the polls are closed nationally. So the networks promise every four years to keep their news to themselves (except for hints) until everyone finishes voting. During the presidential primaries, Slate published exit poll results before VNS members and subscribers released them but is not doing that today under threat of a lawsuit.
Exit polls were first conducted in 1964 as a minor part of a process that sampled key district voting results to project election outcomes. By the 1970s the surveys had become more extensive but were used by the networks to explain the election results, not to call them. In 1980 early exit poll data revealed a Reagan sweep that had not been reflected in the pre-election surveys. NBC used the information to project the winner at 5 p.m. EST. Jimmy Carter found the exit poll data so convincing that he conceded before the West Coast finished voting.
Next question?
Explainer thanks Martin Plissner, former executive political director of CBS News and author of The Control Room: How Television Calls the Shots in Presidential Elections.
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Reader Comments from The Fray:
Last night, I worked with a group of middle-school-aged kids who collected sample data at 14 polling places (24 wards or precincts) and phoned it in to news service. These were not exit polls, but they were actual numbers from the polling places, announced by the poll workers after the polls closed. Each kid was supervised by an adult who verified that the information was recorded and reported accurately, as presented. In most cases, the process was simple and straightforward, but they did find three polling places at which the workers appeared to be having difficulty interpreting and disseminating the information for one reason or another. In all cases, they had trouble incorporating the straight party votes into the individual candidate votes. I was advised that one group of poll workers announced the individual votes, then the straight party results, then told those collecting the information that they weren't sure whether or not the individual totals they announced included the straight party count or not. Another group shut down the machine that counts ballots before the polls were closed and had to count the last ballots as write-ins, then reported the totals in a way that was confusing to those collecting the data. The people collecting the data made attempts to clarify the figures, but left feeling uncertain that the information they had was correct. I wonder how often these scenarios are repeated across the country.
A lot of people assume that the media projections are based on some kind of scientific, mechanized reporting system, but they aren't. They're based on people like us recording data announced by exhausted poll workers who may not get it right. There's a lot of potential for human error which, in a race as close as this one, could make a huge difference in terms of media projections. Those of us who gathered last night, after our kids finished phoning their figures into the news service, don't even want to think about the possibility that the confusion we saw at the polling places could extend to the official vote count.
--Nancy Hall
(To reply, click here.)
Frankly, I think reporting on exit polls and demographic model speculation should be made illegal. It disturbs me to think that the press can model us demographically by race and affiliations. Thus, they feed the machine of stereotyping and racism. They should be ashamed of themselves. They are actively creating the news. The term 'Reporting' is a misnomer; they are creating racism, all for ratings. And the true irony is they feed their racist views and prejudice back into the system and package it as truth. It is racism in a bottle plain and simple! In biology, a closed loop system dies!
--The Reporter
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To The Reporter:
Unfortunately, laws regulating the flow of electoral info would probably face strong 1st Amendment challenges by the networks and be struck down by the Supreme Court (even conservatives like Scalia worship the 1st amendment). I agree that the use of exit polls before polls close should be illegal, but don't expect it any time soon.
----Eco Ed
(To reply, click here.)
(11/10)