Exit poll
An exit poll is an opinion poll taken after voters have exited the polling stations and is designed to give an early indication as to how an election has turned out as the actual result may take hours to count (such as in UK General Elections whose results are not usually known until the next morning) and are usually done by private companies working for newspapers or news companies.
The word "indication" is key as, like all opinion polls, exit polls do by nature include a margin of error although that is accepted to be within 3% for a majority of polls. The most famous example of an exit poll error occurred for the 1992 UK General Election when a majority of pollsters predicted either a hung Parliament or a Labour Party victory under Neil Kinnock. In the event, the Conservative Party Government under John Major held their position with a reduced majority.
In contrast, there were very few people in Britain who could not have predicted Tony Blair's Labour victory in 1997, in that event only the scale of the victory was unexpected.
Exit polling has been widely criticised in cases, especially in the United States of America where they have been released and/or used to project winners before all polls have closed, thereby possibly influencing election results.
This is known as a Bandwagon effect when the poll prompts voters to back the candidate shown to be winning in the poll and as a Boomerang effect where the likely supporters of the candidate shown to be winning feel that s/he is "home and dry" and that their vote is not required, thus allowing another candidate to win.
In the UK General Election, 1997, then Cabinet Minister, Michael Portillo's constituency of Enfield was believed to be a safe seat but opinion polls showed the Labour candidate Stephen Twigg steadily gaining support which prompted undecided voters to support Twigg in order to remove Portillo. This is known as Democracy, elections and parties overview
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