Exit Poll

Examples of Exit Poll in the following topics:

• Types of Polls

  • The main types of polls are: opinion, benchmark, bushfire, entrance, exit, deliberative opinion, tracking, and the straw poll.
  • An exit poll is taken immediately after the voters have exited the polling stations.
  • Like all opinion polls, exit polls by nature do include a margin of error.
  • A famous example of exit poll error occurred in the 1992 UK General Election, when two exit polls predicted a hung parliament.
  • Widespread criticism of exit polling has occurred in cases, especially in the United States, where exit-poll results have appeared and/or have provided a basis for projecting winners before all real polls have closed, thereby possibly influencing election results

• Religious Identity and Politics

  • Today one-fifth of the U.S. public–and a third of adults under 30–are religiously unaffiliated according to national polls.
  • Exit polls suggest that white Americans without religion vote Democratic at roughly the same rates as they vote Republican.
  • According to exit polls in the 2008 Presidential Election, 71% of non-religious whites voted for Democratic candidate Barack Obama, while 74% of white Evangelical Christians voted for Republican candidate John McCain.

• Political Ideology

  • The size of ideological groups varies slightly depending on the poll.
  • Gallup/USA Today polling in June 2010 revealed that 42% of those surveyed identify as conservative, 35% as moderate, while 20% identify as liberal .
  • According to recent polls, moderates are commonly identified as the second largest group, closely trailing conservatives, constituting between 36% and 39% of the population.
  • CNN exit polls have found moderates to be rather evenly divided between the country's two main parties.
  • This chart, using Gallup Poll data, depicts trends in US political ideologies from 1992-2012.

• Early Public Opinion Research and Polling

  • The first known example of an opinion poll was an 1824 local straw poll by The Harrisburg Pennsylvanian for the Jackson Adams race.
  • The first known example of an opinion poll was a local straw poll conducted by The Harrisburg Pennsylvanian in 1824, showing Andrew Jackson leading John Quincy Adams by 335 votes to 169 in the contest for the United States Presidency.
  • The Literary Digest soon went out of business, while polling started to take off.
  • Elmo Roper was another American pioneer in political forecasting using scientific polls.
  • By the 1950s, various types of polling had spread to most democracies.

• The Gallup Organization

  • Gallup Inc. was founded in 1958, when George Gallup grouped all of his polling operations into one organization.
  • Gallup currently has four divisions: Gallup Poll, Gallup Consulting, Gallup University, and Gallup Press.
  • In 1958 the modern Gallup Organization was formed from a merger of several polling organizations.
  • The Gallup Poll is the division of Gallup that regularly conducts public opinion polls in more than 140 countries around the world.
  • For the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Gallup was rated 17th out of 23 polling organizations in terms of the precision of its pre-election polls relative to the final results.

• Telephone and Internet Polling

  • Internet and telephone polls are very useful as they are much cheaper than most other polls and are able to reach a wide population.
  • Online polls are becoming an essential research tool for a variety of research fields, including marketing and official statistics research.
  • Web polls are faster, simpler, and cheaper than many other polling methods.
  • An important aspect of telephone polling is the use of interviewers.
  • However, there are some disadvantages to telephone polling.

• The Problems with Polls

  • A sample size of around 500 – 1,000 is a typical compromise for political polls .
  • Another way to reduce the margin of error is to rely on poll averages.
  • This method is based on the assumption that the procedure and sample size is similar enough between many different polls to justify creating a polling average.
  • A number of theories and mechanisms have been offered to explain erroneous polling results.
  • Since some people do not answer calls from strangers or refuse to answer the poll, poll samples may not be representative samples from a population due to a non-response bias.

• The Importance of Accuracy

  • The importance of accuracy may be illustrated through the example of the Literary Digest Roosevelt-Landon presidential election poll.
  • In 1936, the Digest conducted their presidential poll with 2.3 million voters, a huge sample size.
  • However, the sample turned out to be an inaccurate representation of the general population as those polled were generally more affluent Americans who tended to have Republican sympathies.
  • At the same time, George Gallup conducted a far smaller, but more scientifically based survey, in which he polled a more demographically representative sample.
  • Relevance of the survey information, quality of the data, and overcoming personal bias are integral to polling accuracy.

• Conducting Polls

  • Steps to conduct a poll effectively including identifying a sample, evaluating poll questions, and selecting a question and response mode.
  • Generally, in order to conduct a poll, the survey methodologist must do the following :
  • Usually, a poll consists of a number of questions that the respondent answers in a set format.
  • When properly constructed and responsibly administered, questionnaires become a vital instrument for polling a population.
  • Adequate questionnaire construction is critical to the success of a poll.

• The 24th Amendment

  • The Twenty-fourth Amendment prohibits both Congress and the states from conditioning the right to vote in federal elections on payment of a poll tax or other types of tax.
  • President Johnson called the amendment a "triumph of liberty over restriction" and "a verification of people's rights. " States that maintained the poll tax were more reserved.
  • Mississippi's Attorney General, Joe Patterson, complained about the complexity of two sets of voters - those who paid their poll tax and could vote in all elections, and those who had not and could only vote in federal elections
  • The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.