Tuesday, March 07, 2000
How news outlets analyze poll results
Early counts, exit interviews frame stories
BY JOHN KIESEWETTER
The Cincinnati Enquirer
When ballots arrive for counting after polls close tonight, nine bags with bright orange tags will be grabbed first by Hamilton County Board of Elections workers.
The nine precincts will be among the first counted, part of the hundreds requested throughout Ohio to help TV networks and the Associated Press project the Democratic and Republican presidential winners.
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“They've asked us for vote totals for special precincts as soon as possible,” says Pam Swafford, deputy elections director. “We inspect the bags, open them, and take them upstairs immediately to get them counted.”
The process will be repeated today across Ohio, and in 10 other states from New York to California, at the request of the Voter News Service, a consortium of ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News and the Associated Press.
The New York-based VNS also provides another important election day function — conducting the exit polling of voters, which is the basis for voting trend stories broadcast this afternoon and evening hours before polls close, and published in tomorrow's newspapers.
Exit polling, first used by networks in the 1960s, has provided crucial information about crossover voting by independents and Democrats for Sen. John McCain in Republican presidential primaries this year, and about how people of various faiths feel about George W. Bush and Mr. McCain.
“The only way you can know that is by asking people (in exit polls),” says Kathy Frankovic, CBS News' director of surveys. “Exit polls are the best way of trying to understand what voters are trying to say by their vote.”
And this year, the public can also see poll questions — and responses — on the Internet. State exit poll results are posted after polls close in each state on the ABCnews.com web site (abcnews.go.com/sections/politics/2000vote/exitpoll_by_state.html).
A virtual army, more than 1,000 people nationwide, will help VNS compile voters' opinions and raw vote totals today, says Lee C. Shapiro, VNS media services director.
In Ohio, “hundreds and hundreds” of people will be deployed throughout Ohio's 88 counties at the direction of Maryann Vallone of Sycamore Township, VNS' Ohio manager and owner of Marketwise Communications.
VNS won't let Ms. Vallone speak to reporters, so it's not known exactly how many people are gathering election data in Ohio. VNS also won't say how many voters will be polled in Ohio or other states today. Details are kept secret to protect the scientifically selected random probability sample, Ms. Shapiro says.
“There has to be as little of a bias as possible,” Ms. Shapiro says. “If you mention a precinct (in the paper), there could maybe be undo attention to that precinct — people could think they're more important — and it may affect the turnout in that precinct.”
But area county elections officials had no problem discuss ing VNS' plans. They say VNS will do exit polling in six precincts, two each in Hamilton, Butler and Warren counties.
VNS also has requested results from 18 target precincts — five (of 141) in Warren County, four (of 279) in Butler County and nine (of 1,083) in Hamilton County. They represent a mix of urban, rural and new suburban neighborhoods. (There are no sample precincts in Clermont County today.)
According to VNS, a probability sample of voting precincts within each state is selected that represents the different geographic areas across the state and the vote by party. Precincts are then selected within a probability proportionate to the number of voters in each precinct, so each voter in a state has the same chance to have his or her precinct selected, VNS says.
After picking sample precincts, VNS requested a letter from Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell asking county boards of elections to provide results as early as possible.
However, Butler and Warren counties promise no favors to VNS. “We count them when we count them,” says Susan Johnson, deputy Warren County elections director.
In some counties, VNS has three people doing different tasks — asking voters to complete exit poll surveys; getting the results from targeted precincts; and collecting the countywide vote count.
Information from exit polls, called in to a New York phone bank throughout the day, begins flowing into newsrooms in waves by mid-afternoon. Listen closely to afternoon newscasts and you'll learn about voters' attitudes from earlier in the day. In all, VNS polls about 2,000 voters in each state, according to wire stories from primaries last month.
“The exit poll is very helpful to understand what is taking place, so you can explain it to viewers, particularly on a day like Super Tuesday, when you have polls closing between 7 p.m. and 11 p.m.” in more than a dozen states and four time zones, says Ms. Frankovic.
“You're always surprised by what you end up highlighting on the news from the exit polls,” says Ms. Frankovic, former president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research.
In Michigan, VNS' polling revealed that Mr. Bush drew 75 per cent of the Republican vote, while Mr. McCain attracted mostly Democrats and independents.
“If all we had were raw vote totals, you wouldn't have known that 75 per cent of the Republicans had gone to Bush. You would have assumed it was across the board,” says Al Tuchfarber, director of the University of Cincinnati Institute for Policy Research.
Exit polls have been used by the TV networks since the late 1960s. In 1990, the four major networks — ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN — formed Voter Research and Surveys to pool election polling. The company was renamed Voter News Service in 1993, when it merged with the vote tabulation service operated jointly by the Associated Press and United Press International.
At the polling places, VNS workers ask people to fill out a confidential questionnaire after they vote. The questions were written after the Michigan primary, and approved by representatives to the consortium.
But not everyone agrees to take the survey, which can skew the results, say some researchers.
“The sample is very self-selected, because only the people who want to take it do so, so the survey is biased,” says Gene Beaupre, a Xavier University political science professor who has worked election nights for VNS.
Butler County Board of Elections Director Bob Mosketti, and his counterparts in other counties, say people often complain that they don't want to be pestered by pollsters after voting.
“Their vote is sacred and they don't want it divulged. But others will discuss it,” Mr. Mosketti says.
After polls close, another VNS platoon gathers the county-by-county raw vote totals and phones them to New York.
The raw vote totals, plus results from key precincts, help VNS project winners after the polls close.
Since 1980, consortium members have agreed not to announce predicted state winners until polls have closed in that state, Ms. Shaprio says. That year, Ronald Reagan defeated President Jimmy Carter in a lopsided race called by the networks while polls were open in the Pacific Time Zone.
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