[1] Its mission was to provide results for United States presidential elections, so that individual organizations and networks would not have to do exit polling and vote tallying in parallel.
The VNS included major United States television networks and newspapers: ABC News scooped its partners all night in reporting outcomes of the 1994 US elections when it hired an outside firm to do exit polling and was able to make earlier calls with that data.
The service also received criticism for calling Florida for Gore before the polls closed in the Florida panhandle, which was located in the Central Time Zone and heavily Republican, and for calling the state to Bush before precincts in Broward, Palm Beach, Volusia, and Miami-Dade Counties reported their results to the state.
Due to the Bush margin of victory being less than 0.5% of the total number of votes cast, an automatic statewide machine recount was ordered.
[citation needed] However, the NEP had controversies of its own for 2004 when it released exit polling data early that was significantly different from the final results.