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According to the latest election day exit polls: Average so far is: 58% Republican 14% Dem 28% Other The “other” category is likely independents leaning Republican and Republican voters who won’t talk to pollsters. THIS IS HUGE!

The National Council of La Raza says there is no way more Latino voters supported Donald Trump than supported former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012. According to exit poll data, Trump received 29 percent of the Latino vote, compared to the 27 percent Romney received in 2012. While Trump lost the Latino vote Tuesday night, his 36 percentage point margin of defeat among Latinos was also smaller than Romney’s 44 percentage point loss to Barack Obama. La Raza, however, says that exit poll data is incorrect. ...more...

Now, a group of data scientists, journalists and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs is seeking to upend that reporting tradition, providing detailed projections of who is winning at any given time on Election Day in key swing states, and updating the information in real time from dawn to dusk. The plan is likely to cause a stir among those involved in reporting election results and in political circles, who worry about both accuracy and an adverse effect on how people vote. Previous early calls in presidential races have prompted congressional inquiries. The company spearheading the effort, VoteCastr, plans real-time projections of presidential...

First exit poll results out at 5:00 PM EST.

Exit polls released after the close of voting in Israel's national election show that the race is too close to call. Israel's Channel 1 and Channel 10 both said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party and Isaac Herzog's Zionist Union secured 27 seats each in the 120-seat Knesset. Channel 2, meanwhile, have Likud 28 seats and the Zionist Union 27. The numbers were published by Haaretz. What that is likely to mean is, as NPR's Emily Harris tells our Newscast unit, Israel's new government won't be immediately known. Emily says: "The new government will need approval from a majority of...

Polling stations opened at 7 a.m. on Tuesday as Israeli citizens headed for the ballots to vote for Israel’s 20th Knesset, bringing a heated campaign season to a close. Polls from the end of last week left options open for a tight race. TV exit polls were published at 10 p.m., as polling stations closed, after which official results began to roll in. The official final results won’t be publicized until Thursday.

A growth in early voting and tough economy for the media are forcing changes to the exit poll system that television networks and The Associated Press depend upon to deliver the story on Election Night, all with the pressure-filled backdrop of a tight presidential race. The consortium formed by ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News Channel, NBC and the AP is cutting back this year on in-person exit polls while upping the amount of telephone polling. This is to take into account more people voting before Nov. 6 and households that have abandoned land lines in favor of cell phones. "It...

Breaking from two decades of tradition, this year’s election exit poll is set to include surveys of voters in 31 states, not all 50 as it has for the past five presidential elections, according to multiple people involved in the planning.

Nearly two out of three South Carolina Republican primary voters say the recent Republican presidential debates played an important factor in their decision, according to early CBS News exit polls - a good sign for Newt Gingrich, who was widely seen as outshining rival Mitt Romney in both debates there this week. Sixty-four percent said the debates were an important factor for them; just 34 percent said they were not. Gingrich won standing ovations in both debates while Romney often struggled - and at one point received a smattering of boos for equivocating over how many years of his tax...

I had already made up my mind that if I were approached by any exit pollers after I voted, that I would tell them to go oooooggggggaaaaa themselves.

WASHINGTON, DC: On presidential election day, November 4, all eyes will be on what exit polls say voters did, and analysts fear they could give a rosier view of support for Democrat Barack Obama than reality. The combination of the exclusion of early voting, and the greater tendency of young voters--more often Obama supporters--to take part in the surveys, could skew the results of the exit polls, which, taken just as voters leave polling booths, are the closely-watched first indicators of how the election is going. In a National Journal article in March, Mark Blumenthal of pollster.com stressed that overestimation...

Media outlets are preparing for the possibility that their Election Day surveys could be skewed because of overstated support for Barack Obama, largely because of the enthusiasm of his supporters. While exit polling is a notoriously inexact science—early exit poll results suggested John Kerry would be elected president in 2004—the introduction of several new variables, ranging from the zeal of Obama’s supporters to his racial background to widespread early voting, is causing concerns among those who charged with conducting the surveys and the networks that will be reporting them. “It’s in some ways the flip side of non-cooperation,” said one...

Barack Obama has taken a slight lead with white independent voters for the first time in the presidential race, positioning him to capture a key demographic group that has eluded recent Democratic nominees, according to a Politico analysis of independent voting patterns. According to Gallup’s weekly average of some 6,400 registered voters, Obama now holds a 45 percent-43 percent edge over Republican John McCain with white independents. About eight in 10 independents are white. Should Obama’s support hold, he is positioned to become the first Democrat to win white independents in a two-man race since the advent of exit polling....

Polling place surveys frequently overstated Obama vote during primaries NEW YORK - Barack Obama’s tendency through the Democratic primaries to perform better in exit polls than he actually does at the ballot box has some media organizations nervous heading into Election Night. Television networks want to avoid having their performance become an issue for the third straight presidential election. Their political experts hope that experience gained during the primaries will help things run smoothly Nov. 4.

The AP has released its early exit polling demographics in Wisconsin, and the results offer hope to both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. They confirm that populist rhetoric has large appeal among Democrats, where 70% of their primary voters oppose globalization, and a majority felt the economy was performing poorly. Both candidates spent the last week hammering those themes and have to be encouraged that they resonated with the party base. The other numbers favor Hillary. More women than men voted on Democratic ballots, and nine in ten were white. Only about 40% were college graduates, where Obama usually holds...

One thing that irritates me of media coverage of the primaries has been the analysis of exit polling and reporting of demographic trends based on this polling. They all race to announce their guess of the primary winner and then they break down how this race voted for that candidate or how this age group felt about the economy, etc. The naive viewer might assume all this stuff came off the ballots. I never hear mention that this comes from exit polling, the sample size, the error rate of exit polling etc. Curious how serious we should take this kind...

NEW YORK - Warren Mitofsky, a survey researcher who pioneered the use of exit polls to cover elections and helped develop the sampling method used in most modern telephone polling, has died. Mitofsky, who was 71, died Friday in New York City of an aortic aneurysm. Joe Lenski, Mitofsky's partner in exit polling for the last two national elections, confirmed his death Saturday. Mitofsky started conducting exit polls in 1967 for CBS News and developed the projection system and analysis system used by CBS and later by a consortium of news organizations that conducted national exit polls. "He was the...

Trinity Baptist Church in Ellenwood in south DeKalb County was one of the polling places where U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney and challenger Hank Johnson jockeyed for the Democratic nomination to represent the Fourth District. Shawn Manns, like many McKinney supporters, blamed the media for a negative portrayal of the outspoken lawmaker. “I think it was a witch hunt,” the 38-year-old Atlanta firefighter said. “She’s had her controversy but she’s human. I feel like she’s done a good job.” On the other side was Gregory Johnson, a 45-year-old mortgage banker. He said he voted for Hank Johnson because he “has his...

Report Outlines Exit Polling Problems Wed Jan 19, 1:51 PM ET By SETH SUTEL, AP Business WriterNEW YORK - Two firms that conducted Election Day exit polls for major news organizations reported Wednesday that they found a number of problems with the way the polls were carried out last year, resulting in estimates that overstated John Kerry (news - web sites)'s share of the vote. Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International found that the Democratic challenger's supporters were more likely than President Bush (news - web sites)'s supporters to participate in exit poll interviews. They also found that more...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Exit polling, long a key indicator of election trends, emerged on Wednesday as a big loser in the 2004 election after Internet pundits latched onto early data to mistakenly report a commanding lead for Democrat John Kerry in key states. The use of the raw, preliminary data on freewheeling Web sites triggered a brief but doomed wave of euphoria among Kerry supporters and a sharp drop on Wall Street. The data also wound up being telegraphed by mainstream media in TV reports. The truth was that in the end Kerry did not win states like Ohio...