Here’s what to know about exit polls and how they’re used on Election Day
If you’re tuning into Election Day news coverage, it’s likely anchors and experts will talk about exit polls.
But how do they work and can we trust them to be accurate?
Here’s a brief rundown of what to know while you’re watching the results roll in.
A history of exit polls
Exit polls are surveys conducted through interviews with voters just after they’ve cast ballots that are used to predict the election outcome, according to the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). The practice began in the 1970s with major TV networks each collecting data separately.
Over the years, operations were consolidated. By 2003, The Associated Press, ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX and NBC formed the National Election Pool, according to AAPOR.
In 2018, The Associated Press created VoteCast with Fox News to parallel the National Election Pool, Politico reported. VoteCast is designed to “overcome the bias and inaccuracies inherent in the in-person exit poll,” the AP says.
“Using a random sample of registered voters to carefully calibrate a massive poll conducted using opt-in online panels, AP VoteCast delivers the best of both methods: research with the accuracy of random sampling combined with the depth provided by an online poll that interviews tens of thousands,” AP says.
You read read more about VoteCast methodology here.
What questions are asked
Pollsters don’t just ask which candidate a voter chose. They also ask what issues contributed to their decision, party affiliation and demographic characteristics such as age, gender, race and education, according to AAPOR.
According to ABC News, a 2020 exit poll question is “Do you think the condition of the nation’s economy is: excellent, good, not so good or poor?
Are they accurate?
While polling leading up to an election doesn’t capture the final decision of voters, exit polling also has its limitations.
For example, the way people vote is changing. According to AAPOR, 16% of voters in the 2000 election cast ballots early. That number jumped to 42% in 2016. This year, with Americans wary of voting in crowds during a pandemic, early voting has reached historic levels.
But pollsters say they’re adjusting.
Edison Research, the company that provides data for the National Election Pool, says it surveys early voters and Election Day voters at polling sites and interviews absentee voters by phone. Learn more about its methodology here and how the polling compares to VoteCast.
Votecast combines “traditional, probability-based polling with an online, opt-in survey of voters in targeted states,” Politico reported.
A word of caution
Polling analysis website FiveThirtyEight cautions against exit polls this year and says it won’t be reporting on them very much on election night.
“The pandemic has undermined the one major advantage exit polls have over other kinds of polls: their ability to survey only actual voters, since exit polls catch respondents as they exit polling locations,” FiveThirtyEight says. “But in 2020, far fewer people will be voting in person on Election Day than in previous years.”
It cites changes that Edison Research is making to account for the pandemic — phone calls and early voting polls — as added weaknesses when it comes to reliability and accuracy.
“What this boils down to is that, this year, there’s no reason to believe that exit polls will be any more accurate than traditional pre-election polls,” FiveThirtyEight says. “And so it’s hard to make a case for giving them more weight than the many pre-election polls we’ve been looking at already.”
Trump can win the election despite his lagging poll numbers, experts say
