2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: I am Very Disappointed with the Democratic Party [View all]Time for change
(13,714 posts)Yes, it is true that they are not perfect.
But they are far better than pre-election polls because: 1) they measure who people voted for rather than who they say they intend to vote for at a later date; 2) they do not rely on models to predict who are likely voters because, again, they measure only people who voted, not who they judge to be likely voters, and; 3) getting a representative sample is much easier and more accurate with exit polls because they take their samples from people at the polls rather than rely on such things as telephones, which typically grossly under-represent people who use only cell phones --i.e. younger voters who are voting for Sanders in such large numbers.
More importantly, when elections are conducted by machines that can be manipulated to favor one candidate or the other, and especially when those machines produce "votes" that cannot be verified through a hand recount, one must assume that exit polls are also more accurate than the official vote count.
That is why other democracies use them as a check on official vote counts to identify possible election fraud and sometimes overturn elections when the exit polls differ too radically from the official count. The fact that the U.S. doesn't use this very valuable election integrity check is one of the many reasons why our election system is ranked last among Western democracies.