Maybe the television network news organizations deserve much of the criticism that’s being piled on them for their Election Night debacle, but at the same time, wouldn’t it be fair to point out that in one sense, their “incorrect” projections were closer to the truth than the official results that put Mr. Bush in the White House?
The people who told the exit pollsters that they voted for Gore weren’t aware that they may have voted for Buchanan, or that because their voting cards had been improperly aligned, they punched holes corresponding to no candidate’s name, or that while they thought they had registered a definite vote, they hadn’t punched the ballot hard enough to remove a chad that they never even knew existed.
So perhaps it wasn’t the polling and the projection process that was so wrong, but rather the voting system and machinery. In his commentary piece, Medill School of Journalism Dean Ken Bode poses the question of whether exit polls have outlived their usefulness. I don’t think so. I submit that although the networks may need to rethink the way they make their projections, the “wrong” exit polls of the 2000 presidential election actually served to put an exclamation point on everything that went wrong in the Florida voting. Maybe the ultimate usefulness of exit polling is to help keep the counting honest after the polls have closed.
