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Ten Reasons Why You Should Ignore Exit Polls

from the fab folks at fivethirtyeight.com;1. exit polls deliver a much larger inbred room object of mistake than regular polls. this is because of what are known as cluster sampling techniques. exit polls are not conducted at all precincts, but only at some fraction thereof. although these precincts are selected at chance and are alleged to be reflective of their states as a well, this introduces another occasion for error to occur (say, for example, that a particular precinct has been canvassed especially heavily by one of the campaigns). this makes the margins for error somewhere between 50-90% higher than they would be fit comparable telephone surveys.2. exit polls have resolutely overstated the republican allowance of the vote. many of you discretion recall this happening in 2004, when leaked exit polls suggested that john kerry would have a much recovered epoch than he actually had. but this occasion was hardly inimitable to 2004. in 2000, for instance, exit polls had al gore winning states be alabama and georgia (!). if you go bet on a support and watch the war room, you’ll find george stephanopolous and james carville gloating over disappear polls showing bill clinton winning states like indiana and texas, which of course he did not gain.3. exit polls were particularly bad in this year’s primaries. they overstated barack obama’s performance by an average of about 7 points.4. evacuation polls challenge the definition of a random sample. although the exit polls have theoretically established procedures to rally a random sample — essentially, having the interviewer approach every nth person who leaves the polling place — in wont this is hard to execute at a busy polling place, outstandingly when the pollster may be standing many yards away from the polling place itself because of electioneering laws.5. democrats may be more likely to participate in take one’s leave polls. interdependent to items #1 and #4 above, scott rasmussen has found that democrats supporters are more likely to agree to participate in exit polls, to all intents because they are more enthusiastic about this referendum.6. exit polls may have problems calibrating results from prehistoric voting. contrary to the habitual wisdom, exit polls will attempt account because people who voted before electing day in most (although not all) states by means of a random telephone sample of such voters. however, this requires the polling firms to guess at the ratio of early voters to regular ones, and sometimes they do not guess correctly. in florida in 2000, looking for instance, there was a substantive underestimation of the absentee vote, which that year was a substantially republican vote, paramount to an overestimation of al gore’s share of the vote, and contributing to the infamous miscall of the state.7. withdraw polls may also miss late voters. by “late” voters i mean persons who afflicted with to their polling hit pay dirt in the last two of hours of the day, after the exit polls are in of the answer. although there is no sensitive consensus nearly which types of voters exhibit to vote later rather than earlier, this adds another way in which the sample may be nonrandom, particularly in precincts with long lines or extended voting hours.8. “leaked” door poll results may not be the genuine article. on occasion, sources like matt drudge and jim geraghty have gotten their hands on the actual exit polls at ease by the network pools. at other times, they may be reporting data from “first-wave” make one’s departure polls, which contain extremely small sample sizes and are not calibrated for their demographics. and at other places on the internet (though likely not from gergahty and drudge, who actually participate in reasonably good tail find records), you may see numbers that are completely fabricated.9. a high-pitched-turnout election may make demographic weighting difficult. moral as absolute, phone polls are having difficulty this cycle estimating apparatus demographics — will younger voters and minorities swagger up in greater numbers? — the same challenges await exit pollsters. remember, an departure poll is not a definitive record of what happened at the polling place; it is at best a incidental sampling.10. you’ll know the actual results soon enough anyway. have patience, my friends, and consider yourselves timely: in france, it is illegal to conduct a canvass of any kind within 48 hours of the designation. but vanish polls are de facto more trouble than they’re significance, at least as a predictive tool. an independent panel created by cnn in the wake of the florida tragedy in 2000 …

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