Why Respond to Exit Polls?

By Robert Y. Shapiro and Lisa Ferraro Parmelee

Election day voters’ polls are commonly called “exit polls,” since the data are collected from voters as they “exit” their places of voting. The person best known for developing exit polls was a statistician named Warren Mitofsky, who died last September 1. According to Richard Morin, then polling director for The Washington Post, Mitofsky “introduced exit polling to the world, including to countries new to democracy and free elections. His reputation for accuracy and independence—a reputation he fiercely guarded—made his exit polls the gold standard with which election results were compared and confirmed.” And yet exit polls have been surrounded by controversy in recent years, with some questioning the accuracy—and hence the value—of the data they yield.

The lead article in the November 2004 preview issue of Public Opinion Pros was entitled, “Why Respond to Polls? Public Opinion Polling and Democracy.” In such discussions of the importance of responding to polls and the need for high response rates to improve the quality of the data, exit polls are included—if they are included at all—as an afterthought. We tend to assume that exit poll data will be better than data from other polls anyway, since they are surveys of actual voters leaving their voting places, and they have response rates of 50 percent or higher. Well, it turns out these 50 percent response rates alone are not high enough.

After enjoying for many years a reputation for “uncanny accuracy”—a term Jim Lampley used to describe social research in The Huffington Post—the exit polls were first cast into doubt by the chaos surrounding the presidential election of 2000, when the media twice declared the winner prematurely, based on exit poll data, before declaring the race too close to call.

In 2004, there was all sorts of confusion about whether it looked like John Kerry would beat George W. Bush. The real confusion was in the reporting of the early exit polls, which everyone should have known were not likely to be accurate since they were warned by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International, who were running them. But by election night, when the third wave of the exit polls came in and the data were weighted for certain sampling characteristics—but not yet for the actual counted vote in each state—the exit polls were still off in a way that very consistently overestimated the Kerry vote and the number of Democrats voting nationally. We see this net Democratic bias in a great many states, which casts doubt, prima facie, on claims of errors in vote counts in any particular states. Mark Lindeman goes into greater detail on these discrepancies in this issue of Public Opinion Pros in his article, “Condemned to Repetition: The 2006 Exit Poll Controversy,” and discusses how controversy on these grounds continues to haunt the exit polls from the national elections of 2006.

The main credible claim that the 2004 exit polls were not correct came from the exit pollsters themselves, who reported there were problems having to do with interviewer characteristics (young, Democrat-friendly?) and interviewer training, plus speculation that Democratic voters were more favorably predisposed than Republicans to respond to the polls. Given that it would have been in the pollsters’ interest to claim their polls were right and the vote counts wrong, their admitting that the polls were basically, and quite frankly, sloppier than they should have been lends credibility to others' claims of inaccuracy.

In the future, the exit pollsters have, of course, said they will do better, by learning from their mistakes. But there probably would not have been these problems for estimating the election results if the exit polls had a higher response rate, like 70-80 percent or more, instead of just over 50 percent.

So, why should voters respond to exit polls? First and foremost, they provide data to explain, not predict, election outcomes. Making early predictions on election day is entertainment and pseudo-news. In fact, as Paul Lavrakas argues in “Why Our Democracy Needs Accurate National Exit Polls,” though exit polls are done by and for the news media, their purpose and importance lie less in helping to project election results early and more in helping to explain the results afterward—that is, explaining who voted for whom, and why.

Another reason to respond to exit polls was, up until recently, more relevant in other countries than here. In newly developing democracies that have histories of authoritarianism and corruption, freely conducted exit polls have provided a way to check and to validate the official election results—a way to keep the vote counts honest, or to reveal fraud in cases where fraud has occurred. This happened during the political transition in Yugoslavia where fraud was found, and in recent elections in former Soviet states. Debates have also surrounded both national and local elections in Mexico. Granted, there can be problems with biased exit polls, as controversy in Venezuela has shown, and as we saw front and center in the 2004 election in the United States. In general, however, such independent vote counts are all for the good; indeed, in “Warren in Mexico: Elections Become Citizens' Events,” Ulises Beltrán describes how Mitofsky’s work in that country contributed greatly to the construction of a reliable electoral system there.

Finally, exit poll data are utilized by a very wide range of scholars, teachers, and other researchers and analysts. This information is used very broadly and extensively by political scientists in the study of public opinion, voting, elections, and the political process. These data have also been used by sociologists in the study of American society, by public policy specialists in analyses of policymaking, and by journalists in informing the public and its leaders about the opinions of the citizenry and the choices made by voters. They are widely used by students in preparing dissertations, theses, research papers for courses, conferences papers, and publications in the study of politics and society.