Yahoo! News - Exit poll data will be delayed

Yahoo! News - Exit poll data will be delayed
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."

The data were supposed to be kept confidential and only used to help the networks plan their election night broadcasts. The early polls showed Sen. John Kerry (news - web sites) leading President Bush (news - web sites) in the race for the White House and in key states such as Florida and Ohio. By shortly after 3 p.m. ET, some television commentators were hinting that Kerry appeared likely to win.

After polls closed across the nation and real votes were counted, it became clear Kerry had lost the race. He got 48% of the vote nationally. Bush got 51%. Gawiser said the consortium is continuing to review how future exit polls can be made more accurate.

The networks had hoped to avoid any controversy involving exit polls. They were still stinging from what happened in 2000. Then, flawed exit polling in Florida contributed to the mistaken "calls" giving that key state to Vice President Gore and then to Bush.

This year, the leaking of the early exit poll data and the subtle use of it to hint at a possible Kerry victory caused the networks and the pollsters they hired to do the work some embarrassment.

The polling firms -Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International - and the networks said critics didn't understand that early day exit polling often produces results much different from final vote tallies. This year, some pollsters theorize, Kerry's supporters may have been more eager to get to their polling places early.

Mark Blumenthal, a pollster who caught attention this year for his Web site, mysterypollster.com, said the delayed release of the exit poll data means "better numbers" that will still be "leaked immediately."