Exit polls have historically been extremely accurate, and those who get the information first have to follow strict rules in working out their meaning in secret.
by Aoife Hurel, Economic Producer
Friday 5 July 2024 00:26, UK
It’s the first big moment on election night: the exit polls, the moment millions of people will tune in to find out how the general election will unfold.
The Labor Party Won an overwhelming majority of 170 seatsis a key part of tonight’s Sky News coverage.
2024 Election: Live updates of exit poll results
The current model was devised in 2005 by Professor John Curtice and statistician David Firth and has been consistently reliable except in 2015, when the numbers of seats suggested a divided government and David Cameron barely won a majority.
But its accuracy has been largely reliable: in 2010 it correctly predicted how many seats the Conservative Party would win.
The field research was carried out by Ipsos UK, which interviewed 133 polling stations across the country this year on behalf of broadcasters Sky News, BBC and ITV News.
Voters were asked to personally fill in a replica ballot paper and place it in a ballot box as they left their local community centre, church hall or train station.
Michael Clemens of IPSOS UK says this, and the scale of the survey, is one of the things that distinguishes this exit poll from many that have come before.
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Clemens said more than 17,000 interviews were conducted.
“We’re dealing with people’s behavior,” he said, “so we’re not asking people how they’re going to vote.”
“We’re talking to electors who just voted, and I’m asking them exactly what they did: eliminate the error of predictive polls.”
Because researchers can only send surveys to a small proportion of all constituencies in England, Scotland and Wales, locations are selected that best reflect the demographics of the country, taking into account the distribution of urban and rural areas.
However, many of the survey locations were in close districts where shifts in support between the major parties were tracked.
The same polling stations are targeted each year, allowing number-crunchers to analyze changes from exit polls from the previous election and other precinct-level data.
Data collected at polling stations is sent back to IPSOS UK by interviewers at several times throughout the day.
There, it is processed and sent via a secure data pipeline to the station’s statisticians and political scientists, holed up in a secret location in the capital.
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“Your phones have been confiscated, there are security guards, so you have no contact with the outside world, you just talk to each other. So it’s a really strange feeling that people are still going to the polls but already know what the outcome is going to be,” Professor Will Jennings said.
The Sky News election analyst and political scientist was one of those inside the sealed secret room on election day, and the main thing experts are noticing is a change in voter behaviour.
“We model the change in voting at each polling place and look for patterns of that change, or specific characteristics of precincts that can predict change and forecast what’s happening across the country,” Prof Jennings says.
Key moments on election night
“We throw a range of variables into the data during the day, such as the proportion of local constituencies that are thought to have voted Leave in the referendum, the number of people in working-class jobs, the number of people who own a car – it could be anything,” Prof Jennings added.
“And we’ll look for patterns in that data and try to explain as much of the variation as we can to make sure our estimates are as reliable as possible.”
