Exit Polls

An exit poll is used a political science tool to gain insight into how an election may turn out. We use exit polls to collect demographic data about voters and to find out why they voted as they did. As we all know, voting is an anonymous activity, so we cannot use a person’s vote on the ballot to determine the things we would like to study – thus we rely on these exit polls to ask voters who they actually voted for to perhaps gain some insight into trends and popular appeal. Exit polls, with all good intent, do have their problems.

Exit polls are often used to predict a winner before a winner is actually announced. This can create major problems. When a winner is predicted before the polls close, this may skew election turnout. For instance, say you live in California. On election day, you see that the exit polls are predicting the winner of a presidential election because of the votes cast on the east coast. Since California and the east coast of America have such a significant time zone change, you may think that because the polls on the east costs already closed and the “winner” was already announced that there is no incentive for you in California to vote, even though you may have hours left to do so. If every voter though this way, there would be no reason for persons on the west coast to vote because the east coast already determined the winner. When the media presents the exit polls as such we can see the problem clearly.

Exit polls during the 1980 and 2000 election clearly show the issues that can arise. During the 1980 presidential election, NBC declared Ronald Regan the winner early on in the night. Since NBC used their data from the east coast where it was 8:15 pm, persons on the west coast, where it was only 5:15 pm, showed up in much smaller numbers that was expected because NBC had already declared Regan the perceived winner. Obviously this prediction was correct, but this strategy is, as I see it, somewhat democratic. NBC has every right to use exit polls, but the way they present their findings seems shaky at best. I thought exit polls were used to scientifically measure demographics and voting trends – not ruin elections. NBC and others new stations should use caution when presenting their exit polling results because there will be millions of Americans who have not yet had the opportunity to vote, who deserve to have a say. In the end, it’s up to the individual voter to determine where they think their vote will count or not, but when the media plays such a large role in elections as they do nowadays, it makes it more difficult for voters to feel that their vote does truly count. If you were told that the election was already pretty much won by Obama – would you still vote for McCain?

Again, in the 2000 election we saw the same thing happen, but perhaps to an even larger degree. Most media stations called Al Gore the winner of Florida long before the polls were even closed. We all know what happened in Florida and who won it. But this is a classic example, gone wrong, of the media calling a winner early on.

The bottom line is – don’t always trust exit polls. They can be very misleading and sometimes flat out wrong – as we saw in 2000. Exit polls are designed to assist us in determining who votes for whom and why, but lately the media has abused this useful tool. The media is beginning to have too much control over presidential elections in particular. Yes, each voter has the choice to come out and vote or not, but when the media plays at “well, the election is pretty much already wrapped up here” – why should people even bother to vote? It’d be nice for once in awhile for the media to back off a little and stop interfering so much in elections. They really have too much power. As we saw during the 2008 election, they tend to favor one candidate more than the other, and I’m worried that this bias will result in faulty polls to mislead voters to vote for the candidate they endorse.