Why Our Democracy Needs Accurate National Exit Polls By Paul J. Lavrakas page2

Granted, the emphasis placed on the accuracy of the exit poll data for the purpose of projecting election outcomes is perfectly appropriate for several reasons. First, the major news media that fund the exit polls (since the early 1990s, a consortium of major news media organizations that includes the Associated Press, ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX, and NBC) want accurate data to fulfill their sincere commitment to reporting accurate news. One of the biggest stories, if not the biggest, reported by the media every four years is coverage of who wins the presidential election in the United States. Thus, there is great motivation to be the first news organization to get this story right on the evening of the election or as soon thereafter as possible.

Second, the media want to be accurate so as to avoid the considerable embarrassment of faulty data contributing to a mistake in calling the outcome of an election. (This is all the more concerning because many people are unaware that the exit poll data gathered on election day are not the only source, and often not even the most heavily weighted source, used by the consortium that gathers and processes the data to predict winners of key elections. Other sources include preelection telephone surveys of “early voters” who voted prior to election day; an amalgam of the results from hundreds of state-level preelection polls of “likely voters” conducted by a multitude of survey organizations; actual vote counts in the sample precincts after voting ends on election day; and, eventually, the actual vote counts throughout all counties and states.) Embarrassment aside, such mistakes are dangerous in and of themselves because they are so highly visible, and they threaten the credibility of the entire exit-polling enterprise.

Third, despite a lack of credible evidence that exit poll projections in the eastern part of the United States have any effects on voters in other parts of the country, the media do not want to take any chance on inaccurate projections in any way altering the voting behavior of citizens living in the western regions of the country. Were this to happen, or even to be perceived to have happened, the efforts of the U.S. Congress to devise legislation to restrict the use of exit poll data—which is routine in many other democracies—might become unstoppable.

But even more important than these reasons for exit poll data to be accurate is that journalists and their news organizations need to be able to describe accurately the mandate of the election and not leave it to the self-serving spin of politicians, their handlers, and other partisan pundits. Imagine what might have happened after the 1980 and 1984 elections, for example, if the Reagan spin doctors had been able to persuade the nation of their highly partisan and subjective view that voters picked Reagan over the Democratic challenger because they were enthused and fully supportive of the winner’s conservative agenda. That this did not happen can be attributed, at least in part, to the solid evidence provided by the exit polls to the press, empowering them with empirical data to help characterize more objectively why voters voted as they did.

The power of such evidence is further attested to by the recent, growing claims of conservative forces—whose own agendas often are not well served by reliable surveys of public opinion—that exit polls are biased toward Democratic candidates (and liberal issues) and thus inaccurate. Were these partisan forces not threatened by the exit poll data that allow journalists to describe accurately why elections turned out as they did, they would be far less motivated to attack the polls’ methodologies.

As Dr. Mike Kagay, former pollster for the New York Times, has noted, the Times’s goal in using election survey data, including those from the national exit polls, is to “aid both its reporters and its readers in understanding how the American electorate [reacted] to personalities, the issues, and the events of the [election campaigns].” Without such a valid information source, neither the Times nor any other news organization would have a confident foundation upon which to build the editorial approach by which they characterize election outcomes and what these outcomes likely mean for the nation. More than merely allowing reporters to write interesting, informative, and accurate postelection news stories, valid exit poll data allow decision-makers at news organizations to make confident judgments about the tenor of their entire postelection news coverage. Furthermore, these data allow all parties interested in democracy, politics, and elections—be they conservatives, moderates, or liberals; Republicans, Independents, or Democrats—to understand in great depth what was on the minds of voters in the past election and thereby better plan their future political strategies and policies.

Writing in 1991 about the 1988 Bush/Dukakis election, Kagay observed that the

The exit poll data made it possible for this story to be told, despite the fact that the Republican candidate won the White House. Had shoddy (unreliable) survey research methods been used to gather those data, no prominent news organization would have been able to explain the meaning of the 1988 election with the same confidence and insight.