MONTREAL (AP) - The problems of the 2000 presidential election night cannot all be blamed on exit polls, says the chief of Voter News Service, but they highlighted the need for an overhaul of how those polls are conducted and used.
Murray Edelman, editorial director of the organization that runs the exit polls, said VNS is undergoing a drastic overhaul of how it collects data and how that data is used. While VNS has had a good record of success over the years - a 99.8 percent success rate - the problems with the 2000 presidential election carried a heavy price, he said.
``We've been so successful at projecting that it's easy to forget they are projections,'' Edelman told a pollsters' meeting Thursday night in Montreal. ``If we weren't so trusted, it would not be such a big deal when we were wrong. I don't think we're going to be so trusted for a while.''
VNS is a polling consortium funded by ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, NBC and The Associated Press. Created in 1990, it provides polling information to the news organizations, which interpret the data independently.
On election night Nov. 7, all six VNS members initially projected that Al Gore had won Florida, a key to winning the presidency. The news organizations later said Florida was ``too close to call,'' but early on Nov. 8, five VNS members declared George W. Bush the winner in Florida and nationwide. The AP was the only one of the six not to declare Bush the winner on Nov. 8.
Edelman outlined many of the factors behind the faulty exit poll projection that led to the Gore call. He said the absentee vote leaned more toward Republicans than anticipated. And he said several other polling error factors leaned toward Gore.
``This was a truly extraordinary situation,'' he told those attending the American Association for Public Opinion Research annual meeting. ``The bad luck is that it happened in an extraordinarily close race we were all focused on.
``But it also showed us that there were some real problems in a system that has served us well over the years.''
Soon after 2 a.m. Wednesday, Bush appeared to have a 50,000-vote lead with an estimated 180,000 votes outstanding. That led the networks to call the race for Bush.
But a tabulation error in Volusia County (Daytona Beach) had inflated that lead by 20,000 votes and there were actually 350,000 votes outstanding, he said.
Some of the lessons from the election, according to Edelman:
Do a better job of anticipating tabulation errors.
Develop a better model of the number of votes outstanding late on election night.
Give elections analysts better access to the history of what's been going on through the night in close states and counties.
©The Associated Press May 17 2001 11:37PM