Why Our Democracy Needs Accurate National Exit Polls By Paul J. Lavrakas

In the past four decades, national exit polling has become a standard part of the political landscape at times of major U.S. elections. Because of the methodological and statistical rigor with which these surveys were planned, implemented, and analyzed—by Warren Mitofsky, Murray Edelman, and their colleagues—the data they generated were embraced with confidence by the news media. However, starting in 2000, a series of unfortunate calamities that had little to do with the exit poll methods and much more with the way the data were used (or misused) by some in the media led to a diminishing level of confidence among many regarding the validity of these surveys. This article focuses on why it is important for American democracy that high-quality exit polling be conducted for the major elections in the United States. As criticism of exit polls grows, in particular with claims of their being biased in favor of Democrats, it is paramount that the major media organizations that make these surveys possible renew their commitment to fund them with the resources that will yield reliable and valid data.

When most Americans think of exit polls, they think of the projections of election winners that are made and announced by the major television networks on election night every other November. The most obvious of the information sources on which these projections are based are the data gathered from voters exiting their local polling places in sampled precincts across the nation.

Although many Americans do not appear to understand or appreciate it, the national exit polls contribute more than just vote projections to our election campaign coverage. Exit polls also shed light on the so-called “mandate” of the election, explaining why the various electorates voted as they did. Although the news media more heavily emphasize the former than the latter use of these data, it is the latter that has a much greater impact on political processes in the United States—and it is the greater importance of this second type of information that makes the gathering of accurate data by exit polls truly critical to American democracy.

Since their inception four decades ago, election day exit polls in the United States have come to be the most comprehensive and reliable source of information about who voted for whom in major U.S. elections and why they voted as they did. No other dataset has such large probability samples (well over 10,000 voters in the national sample and more than 100,000 voters in all the state-level samples that were conducted by Voter Research and Surveys [VRS] in 1992, Voter News Service [VNS] in 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002, and the National Election Pool [NEP] in 2004 and 2006), and no other large survey gathers data from voters immediately after they voted.

Furthermore, all things considered, no other election-related surveying addresses sampling error, coverage error, nonresponse bias (or error), and measurement error issues as robustly as do these media-sponsored exit polls. Therefore, no other survey data can be used as reliably to break out the vote along a myriad of demographic and attitudinal factors. As Warren Mitofsky noted in 1991 in his first scholarly article on the science of exit polling,