What are the exit polls that come after the elections

What are the exit polls that come after the elections

Under elections, in everyday life, a series of terms always return that then we tend to forget. Exit polls, instant polls, opinion polls and screenings are among these and, in order not to arrive unprepared for the usual Mentana Marathon, we wanted to explain them in this article. Let's start with the first. As you can probably guess, the term exit poll comes from two English words: exit, which means exit, and poll, which can be used both to indicate a polling station and a poll. An exit poll is therefore a poll carried out between the electricians and the voters, immediately after they have voted and left the polling station.

The use of this tool has various reasons. First, elections are events of great importance and emotional impact, and many people want to know the results as quickly as possible. In addition, they are useful to the media covering their polls overnight to provide information on the direction the country has chosen to take. But above all, since the voters cast their votes anonymously, the exit polls provide important data on the composition and choices of the electorate, on why and on which groups they vote in a particular way.

Exit polls detected accurately can be extremely accurate. So much so that in Italy and in many other countries it is forbidden to reveal the results of the surveys before the closing of the polls, to prevent them from influencing those who have yet to vote. While in other countries, such as New Zealand or France, they are even banned.

In practice, the exit polls consist of a questionnaire administered to a representative sample of voters upon leaving the polling station, who are asked to report the vote as it has just been expressed inside the voting booth, along with some personal data and information such as age and gender. In this way, at the close of the polls, at 11pm on Sunday, you will be able to get a first idea of ​​how the electoral competition went. According to pollsters, the margin of error is usually around 2%.

The task of carrying out the polls and processing the data is given to polling institutes, that is organizations and research centers that carry out statistical surveys on public opinion. In addition to the exit polls, which collect the vote declared at the exit from the polling stations, through in-person interviews with paper and pen, there are also instant polls, which are conducted by telephone, and intention polls, which consist of interviews conducted in the days immediately preceding to vote. Finally, during the ballots there is also talk of projections. These are not polls, but estimates of the final outcome of the elections based on real data arriving from the polling stations.