What is the exit poll and what is its impact on the final result of the elections

Exit Poll (English Exit poll) - literally "exit poll" (sometimes using "excite-poll") - is now used by sociological services around the world. What is an exitpole? This is a procedure that involves interviewing citizens when they leave the polling stations after they have voted in any election. The results of the exit poll are widely used in the world practice of the science of sociology.

Basic tasks and history of the concept

What is an exitpole? This is the receipt of operational "predictions" of the outcome of any elections and the further accumulation of statistics, data on the existing electorate. The country where the exit poll data was used for the first time is the USA. Journalist U. Mitofsky first conducted a survey of people at the exit, when the election of the governor of Kentucky State was held in 1967. Since then, the concept of what an exitpol has been virtually unchanged. And in all recent elections this poll was more or less successfully applied!

What's the point? What is an exitpole? The procedure itself is as follows: people who leave the polling stations, who have fulfilled their duty, are asked who they voted for. Of course, this happens on condition of anonymity. Assuming that most voters have no reason to answer untruthfully, the data of such polls are used to compare with officially published versions. On election day, the exit polls are widely covered by the press and television. The results, as a rule, are made public at a time when the sites are already closed.

Modern developments

Now the technology of the Internet - World Exit Poll is widely used. Thanks to this online development, citizens having access to it without leaving home, again anonymously, on their own computer can always vote and at the right time create a good rating for almost any political as well as social activities.

Functions

The ExitPole performs the basic functions of informational (which includes preliminary familiarization of the public with the results of any elections) and controlling (minimizing deliberate distortion of the election result). And to make this data even more reliable, two (or more) research companies with independent networks of interviewers are involved. The polls are also divided into two or more (depending on the number of companies) parts. Then the coincidence of these survey results is another quality criterion for all the data obtained.

Why do not people trust?

Yet the results of these surveys are not fundamentally indicative of the population, which often does not know what exit polls are. They actually only inform, for whom only the direct participants in the polls cast their votes in the elections. And the final results may differ from the results of the CEC. But, according to the world practice of opinion polls, exit poll data is likely to have minor errors in comparison with actual voting results.

Results

There is also such an opinion of researchers that it makes no sense to use exit polls in order to check the elections for honesty. In the event that the main population trusts the election institution itself, the "exit poll" as a monitoring of the results will simply not be needed. If such trust of the population (or group of people) is absent, such a survey simply loses its meaning. Since if the pro-government structures already have enough power and economic resources to massively falsify the ballots and the votes of voters, then it will be easy to imitate a positive exit poll! However, without this socio-political procedure - the exit poll - none of the modern elections are already costly!