A Way to Restore Confidence in Elections

Unfortunately, although exit polls were invented in the United States and are vigorously promoted for elections abroad, here they are nonfunctional as a means of election verification.

The 2004 national exit poll was conducted for a consortium of the major news groups (ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX and AP) and was designed to be used by the media in forecasting and commentary -- rather than by citizens for election verification.

This was made clear by the pollsters' response to the nationwide 7 percentage point discrepancy between the exit polls and the official count in the 2004 presidential election. In their subsequent report, the Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky, the pollsters did not include precinct-level data, which the media consortium refused to release. We only know of the discrepancy -- one which represents 9 million votes -- because a technical glitch prevented the pollsters from promptly uploading "corrected" results, that is, results adjusted to conform to the official count.

In 2006 and future elections, the exit pollsters have stated that they will not release results even to their media clients until they are "corrected" to conform to the official count. Of course, once data are "corrected," they are no longer true exit poll results; rather, they accord an unwarranted legitimacy upon the official numbers.

Unlike exit polls that we are used to seeing on election night, a transparent exit poll would not be designed to predict and analyze election results in a hurry. Instead, this poll could be designed from the ground up to check on the validity of election results.

Rigorous statistical design would separate bias in the polling from errors in the count. Such a survey could also resolve specific allegations of fraud in political jurisdictions and with voting technologies known to have a history of irregularities. The entire process -- survey design, raw data and all analysis -- would be open to public scrutiny.

Like the rest of the world, Americans deserve to know when voting machines have not yielded accurate counts and when an election may have been tampered with. We deserve elections that are run fairly and that inspire our confidence. Until our state and federal governments provide a voting system that we can trust, a public exit poll -- open and transparent and publicly funded -- would provide our best assurance of fair elections.