NEW YORK — A growth in early voting and tough economy for the media are forcing changes to the exit poll system that television networks and Associated Press depend upon to deliver the story on Election Night, all with the pressure-filled backdrop of a tight presidential race.
The consortium formed by ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News Channel, NBC and AP is cutting back this year on in-person exit polls while upping the amount of telephone polling. This is to take into account more people voting before Nov. 6 and households that have abandoned land lines in favor of cell phones.
“It makes it trickier,” said Joe Lenski, executive vice president of Edison Research, the company that oversees the election operation for the news organizations. “It means there are a lot of different pieces to keep track of.”
AP reports actual vote counts nationwide and news organizations use those numbers, plus exit polls, results from precinct samples in some states and telephone polls of absentee voters to do their own race calls.
But things haven’t always gone perfectly. The news organizations completely rebuilt their exit poll system after the 2000 embarrassment, when TV networks mistakenly called the race for George W. Bush when it wasn’t decided until a month later (AP mistakenly called Florida for Al Gore, retracted it but, unlike the networks, never called the overall race for George W. Bush). In 2004, early exit poll results overestimated the strength of Democrat John Kerry.
To save money this year, the consortium is doing bare bones exit polling in 19 states, considered non-battleground states with polls showing a strong advantage for one of the presidential candidates. Enough voters will be questioned in those states to help predict the outcome of races, but not enough to draw narrative conclusions about the vote.
“What we are doing is taking our resources and using them where the stories are,” said Sheldon Gawiser, NBC’s elections director and head of the steering committee for the AP-network consortium.
Gawiser noted how the minds of voters can change, even up until the last possible minute.
“It’s a story we want to be able to tell on Election Night and we want to be able to tell it accurately and rapidly,” he said. “I really don’t think it’s much different than any other story we tell.”
