Networks Ready Exit Polls--and Brace for Criticism

With Vice President George Bush leading Gov. Michael Dukakis by healthy margins in most polls, the possibility exists that the TV networks will be able to project a winner next Tuesday night before the polls close on the West Coast.

And if they can, they will--despite heated controversy over early calls in 1980 and 1984 that led to charges that the networks had dissuaded some potential voters in the Pacific Time Zone, Hawaii and Alaska from casting their ballots.

“I don’t buy that argument” that early projections hurt voting in the West, NBC News President Michael Gartner said. “There’s no evidence of that. Besides, our duty is to tell the viewer what’s happened. And when the polls (in a particular state) have closed, and we’re sitting here knowing who’s won, it’s incumbent on us to say.”

What the networks have promised is that they won’t project a presidential winner in a state before polls in that state close (or a large majority of polls in the 11 states that have multiple closing times).

Provided they adhere to that voluntary vow--which they made to Congress in 1985--then they shouldn’t be blamed if they report who the next President will be before everyone on the West Coast has voted, said Rep. Al Swift (D-Wash.), chairman of a House subcommittee on elections.

If a landslide victory shapes up in the East and “rolls consistently across the country,” Swift said, a candidate can legitimately secure the necessary 270 electoral votes before the polls close at 8 p.m. in California.

“And that, I would argue . . . is not the networks’ fault,” he said. “That is the fault of Congress”--for failing to pass legislation he co-authored that would have established a uniform poll closing time across the country. The measure was approved twice by the House but failed to pass in the Senate.

If any of the networks violates its pledge by projecting a winner in a state before polls there have closed, it could provide the push for a third effort in Congress, Swift said.

But if the race is close, as some polls are suggesting it still could be, then the projections will come late, the legislator said, and “there won’t be any impetus to do anything about (the potential problem). We’ll have to wait until there’s something that outrages people again. . . .”

Swift termed the networks’ approach sensible. Like them or not, he said, network exit polls--in which pollsters ask a sampling of voters for whom they voted--and the projections that are based in part on them “are pretty damn accurate.”

Exit polls have been used since 1964, when CBS tried them on a limited basis in the San Francisco area but didn’t use the information to project winners.

Controversy flared in 1980 when the three networks, starting with NBC, declared Ronald Reagan the winner before voting polls closed in the West. President Jimmy Carter also drew criticism for conceding his loss at 9:50 p.m. EST, an hour after NBC’s report but still before Western polls closed.

After equally swift and accurate projections of Reagan’s landslide victory over Walter Mondale in 1984, critics again charged that the fast calls had discouraged voting in the Western states. Studies have failed to prove a significant connection, however.

“I think it is an issue that’s caught on because it (early calls) makes people unhappy to hear something they’d just as soon wait and hear later,” said Warren Mitofsky, who heads CBS News’ election surveys.

‘But you can’t help that,” said Mitofsky, who conducted his first exit polls for CBS “as a practice session” in 1967 with three municipal races in Kentucky.

For one thing, he said, “80% of the population of the United States lives in the Eastern and Central time zones.” For another, “technology has changed. And what these people are really hollering is, ‘Put the technological genie back in the bottle.’ ”

Since the controversy began, seven states have passed laws to restrict exit polling at voting places, basically contending that the pollsters cause congestion and should stay a specific distance away.

But the networks, Mitofsky said, have won court suits to overturn those laws in Wyoming, Montana, Georgia, Florida and Washington, and a TV station in Kentucky successfully triumphed in court over that state’s exit-poll law.

The three networks, who argue that such laws violate the right of free speech, are awaiting a federal judge’s ruling in their bid to overturn a Minnesota law that bans exit pollsters from within 100 feet of a voting place.

U.S. District Judge David S. Doty took the case under advisement in Minneapolis last week, saying he would rule before Election Day.

Exit polls shouldn’t cause viewer criticism for Cable News Network. Although it will be sharing the cost and results of one next Tuesday with the Los Angeles Times, it is only for demographic information--who voted and why--and won’t be used to project a winner, said Bob Furnad, the CNN vice president who is heading the company’s election-night coverage.

Established in 1980, CNN never has used exit-poll projections and won’t now, he said, because the company is opposed to that practice.

“It’s our policy that we don’t do projections for obvious reasons--the potential is there to affect what happens on the West Coast,” he said.

But there is a financial reason, too. “They’re also terribly expensive,” Furnad said. “I’ve got better ways to use the money, which is not limitless.”

Mitofsky of CBS and ABC News President Roone Arledge favor a uniform poll closing as a solution to complaints about presidential victories called so quickly by the networks.

“I think it’ll make the problem go away,” Mitofsky said. “It’s the obvious solution to whatever they keep calling this problem.”

“Absolutely,” Arledge said when asked if he favors a uniform poll-closing law. “I think it’s essential.”

CNN’s Furnad is opposed to the proposal: “I don’t think that’s a terrific idea. I think the states ought to keep their autonomy in terms of what times their polls close.”

NBC’s Gartner is neutral: “That’s none of my business. That’s the business of the Congress of the United States. My business is just reporting the news.”