The fact that this year’s exit poll data was, shall we say, “flawed” is not a secret. With these problems in mind, one of the steps the networks are taking to improve the process is hiding the data until later in the day.
On future election days, news organizations that pay for surveys of voters leaving polling places won’t see results until late afternoon or early evening.
The goal is to avoid a repeat of what happened this Election Day, when leaked information from exit polls was posted by Internet commentators known as bloggers about 1 p.m. ET. That was just minutes after the data had been given to the five television networks that, along with the Associated Press, formed a consortium to pay for exit polls and count votes during major elections.
Sheldon Gawiser, chairman of the polling consortium’s steering committee and NBC’s director of elections, said Wednesday that in future elections, no data will be sent to the networks and AP until at least 4 p.m. ET. The “first wave” of data that bloggers posted this year, he said, was just too raw to be valuable to “people who don’t know what they’re dealing with.”
I think Gawiser may be missing the point here. Many of us who saw the early numbers know exactly what we’re dealing with, at least as much as we can given the fact that the media consortium that conducts the research refuses to divulge the exit polls’ methodology.
The problem is not with blogs having (and sharing) access to the same numbers media outlets have. Were the early numbers misinterpreted by amateurs? The early numbers were misinterpreted by everyone because the data was wrong. After the first round of numbers came out, Karl Rove was preparing to commit hari-kari on Air Force One and John Zogby was announcing that Kerry would top out at 311 electoral votes. These are hardly untrained, lay observers.
Changing the time of the release is hardly going to improve this inconsistent process. Four years from now, networks will get the numbers at 4:00 and they’ll still be online at 4:01. The problem has something to do with how the data is culled, not the time it’s released.