Ain't It The Truth

Written by: Jack Boyte on Jan 13, 2008 10:39 PM EST

"The upcoming primary in South Carolina will be critical for both the Democrats and the Republicans, say the media pundits. And South Carolina is full of evangelicals, they also say. But they have absolutely no clue about what that means.

For example, the exit polls in the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary have asked departing Republican voters if they are "evangelicals," but they don't ask the same question of exiting Democrats—therefore assuming there aren't any evangelicals voting for Democrats, an assumption that is demonstrably not true. The leading Democrats in the race—Obama, Clinton, and Edwards—speak explicitly and articulately as Christians and their campaigns have reached out as much to faith communities as the Republicans have."

The National Election Pool (NEP) is a consortium of news organizations formed in 2003 to provide "information on Election Night about the vote count, election analysis and election projections." NEP's FAQ

Member companies consist of ABC News, the Associated Press, CBS News, CNN, FOX News and NBC News. The organization relies on the Associated Press to perform vote tabulations and contracted with Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International to "make projections and provide exit poll analysis."

The precursor was Voter News Service, which was disbanded in 2003, after controversies over the 2000 and 2002 election results. The NEP plan is largely the suggestion of CNN, which used Edison/Mitofsky as consultants in the past. Mitofsky headed the original pool that preceded VNS.

Despite the pledge to avoid the mistakes of previous years and the consequent increase in sample size, the NEP had exit poll controversies in the 2004 Presidential Election when leaked exit polling data was different than the final results, beyond the margin of error. Some news organizations like The New York Times and The Washington Post, among others, jumped to the conclusion that Kerry would win the election. NEP/Edison/Mitofsky updated the statistical weights to coincide with the vote count. The purpose of the exit poll is not to determine if an election is flawed but the goal of the NEP is to predict winners of races and to describe why a candidate won.

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