Reply #34: Polls That Count

[dzika]

from the January 27, 2005 edition

Polls That Count

The Monitor's View


News media and campaigns long have relied on exit polls - information gleaned from voters, who, after they leave their polling places, voluntarily answer questions that help provide a sense of not only how an election is trending but the reasons behind their choices.

Still, the poll data continue to have limited value. Their reliability is less than perfect. Unfortunately, it's taken the last three national elections to confirm those limitations.

The now defunct exit polling firm, Voter News Service, incorrectly called Al Gore the winner in Florida during the 2000 election. Then, in 2002, the VNS system broke down and couldn't give its media clients any exit polling results. VNS was history at that point.

Then, the two polling companies replacing VNS for the 2004 presidential election admitted last week that their information was, in fact, the most inaccurate of any provided in the past five presidential elections. They produced estimates that mistakenly predicted John Kerry beating George W. Bush.

To their credit, major TV networks subscribing to the poll results didn't use that information to call an outcome, but enough leaked out to Internet bloggers to throw Democrats and Republicans onto quite an election day roller coaster. The mistake also fueled conspiracy theories that GOP supporters had rigged the election.

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http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0127/p08s03-comv.html