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Comment by _AzMoo | Hacker News Reader

Exit polls were historically used as a method of detecting election fraud, because they've always been very accurate. It's only the last few elections where we've seen such a large disparity in polling and actual results.

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Is exit polling no longer working? All of the discussion I’ve seen seems to focus on polling in advance of the election.

Considering the trend for people to be socially canceled, scorned, and shamed for supporting the "wrong" candidate, yes I think exit polling (and all polling for that matter) are not working. People are much more likely to either decline to respond, or they will lie.

> or they will lie

Apparently that isn't a problem. Yet. But non-response is.

I think mail-in ballots are a much bigger problem for exit polling than fear of being cancelled.

I cite no sources, just a hunch.

They are actually both problems. The fear of being "cancelled" due to poll responses is called the Bradley Effect and definitely does apply to exit polls: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_effect#Exit_polling

Exit polling was basically meaningless in this election because mail in votes were the deciding factor.

That is a good point. To the extent that vote-by-mail becomes the dominant choice, we won't be able to rely on exit polls as a check. So it becomes even more important that the other checks we have on the system remain in place.

Yeah, since about 2000 it's been shown to be really unreliable in the US. Heavily weighted towards democrats for much of the same reasons that makes normal polling unreliable now.

The key problem with exit polls (in non-pandemic years) is that they are non-representative until the whole vote is collected and they can be re-weighed.

"exit polls are eventually weighted to match the final results, but that only happens after the election is over. On election night itself, the numbers are reweighted as more data becomes available, but what you’re seeing is still subject to a lot of uncertainty"

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/exit-polls-can-be-misle... has a good discussion.

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