Written by Connor Zahler:
Nothing says election season like a gratuitous amount of TV ads and a deluge of polls. Most people are familiar with the pre-election polls, which usually rely on phone calls to take the temperature of the electorate. These are the polls you see endlessly discussed and debated by every pundit. There’s another type of poll, though, that you’re likely to only hear about on election night: exit polls. To commemorate the recent midterms, we’re going to talk about this lesser-known polling technique, the ideas behind it, and its use.
What is an exit poll?
To keep it simple, an exit poll is a survey given to voters as they leave the voting booth. Most pollsters will choose some amount of voting sites and position a surveyor outside. That surveyor will then, usually using some predetermined system, approach voters and ask them a handful of questions. These questions include demographic data (race, gender, income, etc.), political views (party affiliation, what issues are most important), and how the person actually voted. In the United States, most exit polling is done by Edison Research on behalf of the National Election Pool, an association of news agencies that includes ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC. FOX and the Associated Press, former members of the NEP, conduct their own exit polling.
Why exit polling?
There are two major upsides to exit polling over traditional polling. First, you’re guaranteed to get information about people who actually vote, rather than just those who might or might not vote. Exit polls get information from real voters about how they voted and why they voted and can illustrate demographic trends quite well. Second, traditional polling only targets people with landlines and people who accept calls from random numbers, two groups that continue to shrink. With exit polling, you can reach all segments of the electorate.
The downside of exit polling
Exit polling is far from perfect, however. More and more people vote either early in-person or by mail, with MIT finding that about ¾ voters used either of these methods. That’s a lot of people who can’t be reached by exit polls, not to mention that the demographics of election-day voters and other voters may be quite different. They also face the same non-response issues that other polls do, with slightly more than half of all those asked refusing to participate.
How are exit polls used?
Exit polls are used in two major ways. First, they inform the predictions and calls that news agencies make on election night. If you’ve ever wondered how some races are called seconds after polls close, it’s partially due to exit polls. While other factors have to be considered, and no major news agency uses them alone, exit polls are still a major part of any predictive model. Second, they’re useful in retrospectives and future planning. Exit polls offer incredibly valuable information about what issues people care about and how different demographic groups voted. This information can be used to tell a story about the election and why one candidate or party did better. They can also be used by candidates and parties in planning future outreach: if older voters are beginning to break for you in larger numbers, you may want to concentrate more resources there.
Exit polling controversies
Exit polling has attracted legal controversy in the past, like a lot of activity that goes on near polling places. Several states have tried to ban or regulate exit polling in the past. In general, courts have found that exit polling is a form of speech that is protected, meaning it cannot be exclusively prohibited by law. It is, however, subject to the same regulations as other speech near polling places, meaning that laws that prohibit political speech within 100 (or whatever number) feet of a polling place apply to exit polls, too.
There are also special concerns about the impact of exit polling on voter turnout. There’s a major concern that early publishing of exit poll results may stop people from voting; after all, if it seems like their favored candidate is down an insurmountable amount, why bother? The information from early exit polls is also usually simply inaccurate. Leaked exit polls indicated a Kerry landslide in 2004, for example. To combat both accuracy and impact concerns, exit poll information is usually kept secret right up until the polls close. Some sources do release demographic or voter concern data, but actual election results are kept hush-hush.
Conclusion
Exit polling is a goldmine for anyone who wants to understand the election that just occurred and the ever-shifting winds of American politics. It has issues and has faced numerous legal challenges, but it also seems to be here to stay, at least for the time being. When you look at an exit poll, always keep in mind how that data was collected and might be left out. Political prediction may be like fortune telling, but exit polls provide some guidelines.