The exit pollers said they hardly ever made mistakes - except in 2000,

[TruthIsAll]

http://www.exit-poll.net/faq.html

SNIP

How will these exit polls and projections differ from what was done in 2000?

Since 2000 all models have been updated and improved. Polls of absentee voters in 13 states will be conducted so the absentee vote can be combined with the vote cast at the polls on Election Day. Quality control procedures are more sophisticated. The computer system is new this year and has been extensively tested.
Are these new models and procedures going to assure the public that there will be no mistakes?

The mistakes made during the 2000 election were unusual. During the 10 years before that VNS and the poll before it made only one mistake from 1990 to 1998. Before that, when the broadcast networks made their own projections, there were similarly very few mistakes during the 1970s and 1980s. There were no mistakes during the limited coverage in 2002. There were no mistakes made during the 2004 Democratic presidential primaries. Many lessons were learned from the 2000 experience and changes were made to see that mistakes like the ones in 2000 would be very unlikely to occur again. Having said all that, there is no way to guarantee that a mistake in identifying a winner will not happen again. If it does, the public can be assured that the mistake will be publicly acknowledged and corrected as soon as possible. Even in 2000 the mistakes were corrected by the same people who made them within a short time.

[DELUSIONAL]

1. kick

[althecat]

2. "There were no mistakes during the limited coverage in 2002. " !!!!!

Why then in 2002 did they junk all the poll results and shutdown VNS forever... and why did they do both these things in a secretive and suspicious fashion

[Awsi Dooger]

3. Read that paragraph again

It's obvious they have narrowed the word mistake to mean only one thing: an incorrect call. The "mistakes" from 2000 were the two innacurate calls of Florida, first for Gore, then for Bush. If the second one had never been made, they would be calling it a mistake, singular.

on edit: based on the obvious strict definition of mistake in that article, the title of this thread is unintentionally misleading. There was no mistake on Tuesday night, a state or race called incorrectly for one candidate or another. The exit poll numbers were crosschecked with actual results, which is the standard procedure. Since the two did not match in some cases, no early call was made on those races.