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Key excerpts: Of the newly disclosed data in the Edison/Mitofsky report on this year's exit polls, some of the most important concern results from past elections. While it is is true that the average "within precinct error" (WPE) of 6.5 percentage points in Kerry's favor was, as the report states, "the largest...we have observed on the national level in the last five elections" (p. 31) there was also a similar error in 1992 and a bias favoring Democrats in every national exit poll conducted since the networks started doing a combined exit poll in 1988. Finally, one last gossipy tidbit...

Mitofsky International is a survey research company founded by Warren J. Mitofsky in 1993. Its primary business is conducting exit polls for major elections around the world. It does this work exclusively for news organizations. Mitofsky has directed exit polls and quick counts since 1967 for almost 3,000 electoral contests in United States, Mexico, Russia and the Philippines. .... From 1967 to 1990, Mitofsky was executive director of the CBS News election and survey unit, and was an executive producer of its election night broadcasts. He conducted the first exit polls for CBS in 1967, and developed the projection and...

Bill Crystal says that the exit polls are not reliable this election cycle. BIG SURPRISE! It's the first time this new system has been used.

"AP becomes sole source for vote-counting on election day" "Six major US media organizations such as ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and the AP have formed the National Election Poll(NEP) to replace VNS. This time, the media organizations signed contracts with two veteran polling companies -- Mitofsky International and Edison Media Research that will conduct exit surveys for the Nov. 2 presidential election. The two polling companies agreed that the AP, which has been counting the vote since its founding in 1848, would be their sole source for vote counts. Each of the news organizations will use data...

...[T]he TV networks... say they have revamped the way they collect and analyze polling data, using more sophisticated equipment and better communications. To tone down their competitive instincts in "calling" states for either candidate, some are blocking their news desks from watching rivals' shows. All the networks are also striving to get their respective "decision desks" -- the units that make the calls -- to work more closely with the producers and reporters.... CBS News said the computers VNS used weren't sophisticated enough to compare voting data with historical information and were incapable of raising red flags where they were...

Something just came to me today. Remember how the VNS messup in 2000 depressed Panhandle and Pacific voters? I've got a serious concern.From what I've been reading, early voters trend very heavily Republican. It follows logically that not so many Republicans will vote on November 2nd.Are the exit polls going to account for this? I'm now scared that they'll be wrongly predicting a heavy Democrat turnout in early-voting states. Who is conducting exit polling this year now that VNS has broken up? Is there any way we can contact them and ask them to take this in account?

Anyone still remember the mess all the news outlets made of reporting election results in 2000? Many of us still wonder if that wasn't a contrived deal to help Gore. Newscasters actually were calling the winner in states (like Florida) while citizens were still voting. The problem started with a company named Voter News Service. VNS was owned by the Associated Press and the television networks. It was a profit making organization, a business. The rabidly left AP ran a large part of VNS, so there's little surprise about how they reported things. Generally, through polls and exit polls, VNS...

<p>The missing exit polls for the 2002 mid-term elections have finally been released and they offer strong evidence that the country is not as politically polarized as generally alleged. Rather, the national consensus has been shifting steadily to the right.</p>

VNS Data From '02 Midterm Votes Released By DAVID BAUDER, AP Television Writer NEW YORK - Ten months late, exit poll data that shed light on why Republicans scored their unusual 2002 midterm election victory are finally becoming available. Voter News Service collected the information but couldn't deliver it on election night because computer systems designed for VNS by an outside contractor failed. That failure, coupled with data problems in 2000 that led television networks to prematurely declare George W. Bush the presidential winner, prompted the news organizations to shutter VNS. The consortium included ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox and...

Highlights from the newly released national exit poll of voters in the Nov. 5, 2002, elections for U.S. House: _ 40 percent identified themselves as Republican, up from 36 percent in each of the two previous midterm elections. Democrats made up 38 percent of the electorate in 2002, 37 percent in 1998 and 36 percent in 1994. Self-identified political independents declined to 22 percent in 2002 from 27 percent each in 1998 and 1994. _ 49 percent of women reported voting Republican for House, up slightly from the two previous midterms (46 percent in 1998, 47 percent in 1994). _...

Voter News Service: What Went Wrong? In November 2000, a "perfect storm" of vote-counting miscues and polling problems led the major TV networks repeatedly to change their minds as to whether Al Gore or George Bush was the next president. In November 2002, a second storm whipped through the networks' election broadcasts. Unfinished and mismanaged efforts to update the computer systems used by Voter News Service forced executives at the consortium's owners—ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, NBC and the Associated Press—to abandon the use of exit polling data before it even got all collected. Indeed, by mid-January the failures led...

Voter News Service Ends After Failures Email this Story Jan 13, 1:09 PM (ET) By DAVID BAUDER NEW YORK (AP) - Six major news organizations announced Monday they are disbanding Voter News Service, the consortium they had built to count votes and conduct surveys on Election Day. The decision follows two major election-night failures in a row by VNS. Given the expense of mounting such operations on their own, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and The Associated Press said they were considering other options for sharing vote counts and exit poll surveys. But it will no longer be...

We heard last night that VNS decided its exit polling models were unreliable; hence, no races would be called until the raw vote provided substantial-enough evidence to warrant a prediction. Based on the final result, is there any doubt at all that VNS looked at the predictions and decided it simply wasn't possible the GOP would pickup 3-5 Senate seats and 5-15 House seats? I submit the models worked just fine, but when they didn't play into the media's preconceived notions the evidence was rejected as unreliable. Perhaps it's understable; let's take a look at the Florida gubernatorial contest. The...

VNS Scraps National Exit Poll Work 40 minutes ago By DAVID BAUDER, AP Television Writer NEW YORK (AP) - Voter News Service abandoned its state and national exit poll plans for Election Night, saying it could not guarantee the accuracy of the analysis which media organizations use to help explain why people voted as they did. AP Photo Election Special Coverage News, tools, results and more. Go now. The decision did not affect VNS' separate operation for counting the actual vote. VNS also hoped to have limited information from the exit poll surveys to give its members guidance in projecting...

Hooray: Voter News Service, the exit polling system misused by media organizations to try to call elections, failed today, so there won't be a repeat of the kind of phony pro-Gore guesstimates that marred the 2000 election. News networks announced that they would not call races except, shockingly, on the basis of votes actually counted. VNS, a consortium consisting of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and the Associated Press, said in a statement that its new computer system was not properly analyzing exit poll data, and that the system's output could not be considered reliable. It said it hoped that some...

<p>Voter News Service said Tuesday that it is not satisfied with the accuracy of today's exit poll analysis and will not be in a position on Election Night to publish the results of state and national surveys of voter attitudes.</p>

<p>14:38 PST NEW YORK (AP) -- Its operation riddled with errors, Voter News Service abandoned its state and national exit poll plans for Election Night, depriving media organizations of information to help analyze the vote.</p> <p>The decision did not affect VNS' separate operation for counting the actual vote. VNS also hoped to have limited information from the exit poll surveys to give its members guidance in projecting winners for individual races.</p>

Politics - AP Voter News Service Tests Poll Info. 1 hour, 14 minutes ago By DAVID BAUDER, AP Television Writer NEW YORK (AP) - Hours before Election Day, Voter News Service said Monday it still hadn't worked all the bugs out of a new system designed to provide media organizations with exit polling information from voters. Election Special Coverage News, tools, results and more. Go now. As a precaution, NBC and CBS last weekend began conducting their own joint poll of voter attitudes about the midterm election. VNS, a consortium consisting of ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox and The...

For your amusement on election day, Voter News Service (VNS) will be at it again. Y'all remember them, don't you? That's the consortium owned by ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, and AP that says it counts actual votes for newscasters on election day. The problem is, they also do exit polling in a few targeted precincts and that is what they base their results on. That is the information used by the networks to project winners in individual races. VNS is the group most responsible for totally screwing up what was reported by all TV networks in 2000. Which was...

N E W Y O R K, Oct. 31 — A gay and lesbian rights group complained Thursday that a polling consortium organized by television networks and The Associated Press is doing away with a key measurement of their political clout. The Washington-based Human Rights Campaign says Voter News Service, which conducts exit polls of voters on Election Day, won't ask this year whether the voter is gay or lesbian. Voter News Service is a consortium organized by ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox and the AP to count votes on Election Day and conduct exit polls. It may seem like...