Quarantine Room For Exit Polls

This has a bad smell to it. To make sure they don't give erroneous exit polls they won't report the exit polls until after the actual vote is finished. We use and trust exit polls in the Ukraine, Mexico and all over the world to find corruption. In the good old USA we aren't capable of handling this exercise properly. For some reason, since 2000, the exit polls and the actual vote just don't seem to match. Imagine that. Exit poll analysts going to great lengths to get it right They'll be sequestered to prevent early leaks that can cost credibility. By Matea Gold, Times Staff Writer November 4, 2006 NEW YORK — Haunted by the bungled calls and leaked information that plagued the coverage of the last three nationwide elections, networks are taking no chances when it comes to Tuesday's midterm. This time around, the members of the National Election Pool — a consortium of five broadcast and cable networks and the Associated Press that commissions exit polls of the major races — have decided to sequester two analysts from each news organization in a secret "quarantine room" in New York, where they alone will get access to the first waves of data from precincts around the country. Stripped of their cellphones and BlackBerrys — and even monitored when they use the bathroom — the representatives will be able to study the results of the surveys but will not be allowed to communicate them to their newsrooms until 5 p.m. EST. They must sign affidavits guaranteeing that they will not reveal any data before then. The drastic measures are necessary, news executives said, to prevent the leaks that occurred in the 2004 presidential race, when early exit poll results indicating that Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) was in the lead rocketed through cyberspace. More At The L A Times