Can you trust Election Day exit polls? What to know as Harris and Trump face off

After 5 p.m. Eastern Time on Election Day, Americans will get their first look at exit polls, which could offer early intel in the race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump for the presidency.

But how do exit polls work, and are they reliable? Here’s what to know on Tuesday, Nov. 5.

What is an exit poll?

Exit polls are surveys conducted with voters as they leave their polling place, according to the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). In the confidential questionnaire surveys, voters answer questions that could include how they voted, their demographics and their attitudes toward each candidate.

“Exit polls do something that pre-election polls cannot do: capture the voting intent of last-minute deciders,” AAPOR said.

The National Election Pool is conducted by Edison Research and is funded by ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC. It has been the only national exit poll since 2004.

The NEP polls, according to AAPOR, are supplemented by state exit polls and “telephone surveys of absentee and early voters.”

Edison said it interviewed more than 100,000 voters in the 2020 election, with researchers at more than 500 polling locations.

When are exit polls released?

Results from Election Day exit polls will be shared with news organizations after 5 p.m. ET on Tuesday, Nov. 5, according to Edison. NBC News says it does its own independent analysis of the polls before they are reported.

ABC News, meanwhile, says it will report on the exit polls by about 5:45 p.m. ET.

“No exit polls results which can be used to characterize the winner of the election are published before all of the polls in that state are closed,” according to Edison.

This means data related to demographic groups could be available after 5 p.m. ET, but information on which candidate is leading in exit polls will not be revealed until after a state’s precincts close, Forbes reported.

Can you trust exit polls?

Polling aggregation website FiveThirtyEight said you should proceed with caution when viewing exit poll numbers, especially ones released early in the evening along the East Coast.

“Exit poll numbers can — and do — change over the course of election night, so you should be especially skeptical of the earliest exit-poll numbers, typically released around 5 p.m. Eastern,” FiveThirtyEight said in 2020. “By definition, this first wave of exit polls are incomplete: Polling places are still open, and who’s represented in the electorate could change.”

The polls should be considered “more representative of voters” as the night goes on, FiveThirtyEight said.

No matter how many people are polled, there will still be margins of error within exit polls, said David Sterret, a principal research scientist with The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

“If it is a race that’s being decided by tenths of percentage points, there is going to be no survey that would be reliable enough to be able to predict that on that night, just given that there’s natural statistical error in any survey,” Sterret told U.S. News & World Report.

This story was originally published November 5, 2024 at 12:08 PM with the headline "Can you trust Election Day exit polls? What to know as Harris and Trump face off."