For CBS News, he devised an exit poll in the Kentucky gubernatorial election in November that same year.
Exit polls have historically and throughout the world been used as a check against, and rough indicator of, the degree of election fraud.
The polling locations are chosen to cover the entire gamut of society and where possible, to include especially critical marginal seats.
Investigations into this failure identified a number of causes including differential response rates (the Shy Tory Factor), the use of inadequate demographic data and poor choice of sampling points.
[10][11] Another example of this was the 2024 Indian general election, in which after the voting ended, exit polls showed that the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party–NDA government of Narendra Modi would win 350 to 370 seats in the Parliament of India and thus a landslide, but the actual results showed the opposition's strong performance and led to the BJP failing to gain a majority on its own.
[16] In Egypt, the Egyptian Center for Public Opinion Research conducted two exit polls in 2014 for the constitutional referendum and presidential election.
India being the largest democracy in the world has many agencies publishing exit polls which roughly predict the outcome of the elections.
[23] In the 1980 US presidential election, NBC predicted a victory for Ronald Reagan at 8:15 pm EST, based on exit polls of 20,000 voters.
A study by economist John Lott found an "unusual" decline in Panhandle voter turnout compared to previous elections, and that the networks' early call of Florida for Democrat Al Gore may have depressed Republican turnout in other states where the polls remained open.
This proved successful during the 2005 UK general election, when the BBC and ITV merged their data to show an exit poll giving Labour a majority of 66 seats, which turned out to be the exact figure.
This method was also successful in the 2007 Australian federal election, where the collaboration of Sky News, Seven Network and Auspoll provided an almost exact 53 per cent two party-preferred victory to Labor over the ruling Coalition.
This was followed by a strong protest from the media which caused the Election Commission to withdraw its statement and confirm that the exit polls could be shown at 6:30 PM on 12 May after the last vote was cast.