Exit Polls From '02 Election to Be Released

Byline: Richard Morin and Claudia Deane

The missing-in-action 2002 national exit poll data has been given to the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research for public release after a panel of academic experts reviewed the survey and concluded the results were reliable.

"We have the data for the national exit poll" and will be releasing it later this month, said Richard Rockwell, executive director of the Roper Center. The center, which is affiliated with the University of Connecticut, is the country's leading archive of survey data collected by academic, media and commercial polling organizations, including The Washington Post.

The 2002 exit poll data also was provided last week to another academic archive, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan.

The decision by the media partners to release the data has not ended controversy over the troubled 2002 exit poll. ABC News and Fox News will not be identified as sources of the data when it is publicly offered by the center. In meetings with the other consortium members, both organizations had expressed concern over the accuracy of the results and questioned the value of releasing the survey data 10 months after Election Day, other consortium members said.

"Each of the news organizations involved made independent judgments. The fact that most agreed to release it to a university shows that there is some level of comfort with it. Other news organizations did not join that effort. What you can interpret from that, speaking only for ABC News, is that it's not our plan to report off that information," said Jeffrey Schneider, vice president for media relations at ABC News.

VNS was composed of CBS, CNN, NBC and the Associated Press, together with ABC and Fox. The consortium conducted the exit poll on Election Day last year. But the survey findings were never made public after a massive computer collapse on election night prevented VNS from tabulating the results -- a failure that led directly to the demise of VNS.

Despite the Election Day meltdown, the 2002 results have been eagerly sought by journalists and academics seeking to resolve unanswered questions about the election, including the impact of public worries about terrorism and Iraq on the vote.

To resolve doubts about the accuracy of the results, the former VNS partners directed a panel of academics to review the 2002 data. The panel consisted of Michael Delli Carpini, Dean of the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania; Michael Hagen, a Rutgers University professor; Peter Miller, associate dean of the School of Communication at Northwestern University and editor of Public Opinion Quarterly; and Colm O'Muircheartaigh, vice president for statistics and methodology at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

"The 2002 data is of comparable utility and quality to past VNS exit polls, and we recommend that it be released for public use," the panel recently advised the news organizations.

Along with the results, the former VNS partners sent the Roper Center a written introduction to the data and statement of methodology that will be provided with the data. "While the 2002 data were not processed on election night because of problems with the intake capability of the computer system, there were no reports of problems with the questionnaire itself, the sample of precincts, the number of refusals, or any other part of the actual process of selecting voters and having them answer the exit poll questionnaire," the statement reads.

The introduction goes on to note that the data was provided by CBS, CNN, NBC and the Associated Press.

Lois Timms-Ferrara, associate director of the Roper Center, said the data should be publicly available "in a week or two. . . . We want our archivist to look it over and make sure there is nothing problematic about it." The data will be sold by the center -- "I hope for less than $100," Timms-Ferrara said -- and made available to paid subscribers to the center's online archive.

The data was e-mailed last week to the center and ICPSR by Kathy Frankovic, director of surveys for CBS News. It consists of a computer file containing more that 17,000 individual interviews with voters conducted by VNS on election day.

For the Roper Center, the data represented an unexpected but welcomed surprise.

"I was thrilled," Timms-Ferrara said. "I though those data were lost forever. My reaction was, wow, it's not even my birthday."

Disloyal Loyalists

Those unruly partisans, it's no wonder that the national parties have to spend so much money to keep them in line.

Only one in three self-described strong partisans on each side say they "always vote" for their own party, according to a recent Washington Post poll.

Overall, about one in five Americans describes him or herself as a "strong Republican" (no Arnold jokes please) and the same percentage say they are a "strong Democrat."

But ask them about fealty in the voting booth, and only 32 percent of loyal GOP-ers report an unsullied Republican voting record, and only 38 percent of loyal Democrats. It's a "what have you done for me lately" electorate, folks.

Up to this point, the parties are at parity when it comes to loyalty. Then the Democrats lose it.

While six in ten faithful Republicans go on to say they "mostly vote Republican," only four in ten faithful Democrats give the parallel response.

But where the data taketh away, the data also giveth. Though there aren't as many strong partisans as party chairmen might desire, there are more weak partisans than pollsters often indicate.

Roughly a third of the nation describes themselves as political independents, according to the Post poll. But when asked, the majority of these respondents, report leaning toward one party or the other.

In the Post poll, about four in ten independents leaned toward the Democrats and about three in ten toward the Republicans.

Among those who leaned Democrat, half say they mostly or always vote Democratic, four in ten say they split their votes in half, and only 4 percent report consistently voting for the GOP. The pattern is roughly similar for the comparably sized group who say they lean toward the Republicans.

This puts these independent leaners in striking distance of those who claim a party attachment, but say it's weak.

The Post poll was conducted among 1,003 randomly selected adults nationwide, who were interviewed by telephone Aug. 7-11. The margin of sampling error for overall results was plus or minus 3 percentage points, and ranged from 7 to 9 percentage points for subgroups.

Staff writer Richard Morin is on the board of directors of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Washingtonpost Newsweek Interactive
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group