For decades, Americans have relied on exit polls to illuminate the story of what happened on election night. By gathering opinions from voters largely after they’ve cast their ballots, exit polls fill in the details that our secret-ballot elections otherwise leave impossible to know.
This year, for the first time since 2016, CNN, ABC, CBS, Fox News, NBC and the Associated Press are working together to produce this critical research, in collaboration with SSRS, a nonpartisan research company that also conducts CNN’s polling. On behalf of the six media organizations, SSRS will conduct The Voter Poll in California, New Jersey, New York City and Virginia to cover the marquee contests on this November’s slate. You’ll see the results here as CNN’s Exit Poll.
Reporting on CNN’s exit poll results will begin at 5 p.m. ET. More complete data will be available in the CNN Election Center after polls close in each location.
Traditionally, exit polling has leaned heavily on in-person interviews of a randomly selected sample of voters at different Election Day polling locations. That remains a key part of the polling this time around. But to include people who vote early or vote by mail, those in-person interviews will be combined with survey results gathered before Election Day to ensure that exit polls reflect the views of the full electorate, regardless of when they vote or how they cast their ballot.
There are also adjustments to how the sample is selected to better reflect the electorate, to be more confident that people included in the poll are in fact voters, and to ensure that the adjustments pollsters make on the back end, known as weighting, result in a demographic profile that reflects the people who actually turned out.
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