Roundtable: The Future of Exit Polls

Since our last issue was published, the enterprise of media exit polling has died and been resurrected. Voter News Service, the organization that had provided a consortium of major news networks with exit poll data since 1993, was disbanded in January after having provided faulty data in the 2000 presidential election and no usable data at all in the off-year elections of 2002. A new exit polling operation, the National Elections Pool, has been created to take its place.

With all of these changes underway, we thought it an opportune moment to ask a group of survey directors and public opinion scholars about how exit polling functions in political discourse, about how it should function in political discourse, and about the challenges and opportunities that might be present in this transitional moment. Here's what they had to say:

Michael X. Delli Carpini, Director, Public Policy Program, Pew Charitable Trusts:
"While the media’s interest in the predictive power of exit polls is understandable, and arguably adds to the interest and drama of election night coverage, from a broader perspective this is the least important reason why such polls have been and will continue to be valuable....In the best of worlds these glimpses into the electorate’s mood can serve to spark public and elite conversations that are as crucial to the democratic process as the electoral outcomes themselves." [Full article]

Gerald M. Kosicki, Director, Center for Survey Research, The Ohio State University:
"Without exit polls, winners would be unbound in terms of their so-called mandate to undertake their favorite programs, whether or not those programs are why people elected them. Exit polls give an independent source of additional information that journalists, scholars and citizens can use to help understand what voters really meant when they voted a certain way on Election Day. These data are important and must be gathered systematically and well." [Full article]

Michael Traugott, Chair, Department of Communication, University of Michigan:
"The task for Mitofsky and Lenski is not an enviable one. The old VNS software system, whatever the nature of its current ownership and availability, was not up to the task of handling large amounts of data with current technology. And VNS on its own was unable with almost two years’ notice to develop a functioning new system to produce a relatively limited number of estimates for an off-year election. The new team has less than a year before the first presidential caucuses and primaries to develop another new system to produce a larger number of improved estimates." [Full article]