L.A. Times: Fox News calls exit polls unreliable

NEW YORK — ... This time, the National Election Pool — the consortium of five networks and the Associated Press that commissions the national exit polls — said it was hiring fewer college students in favor of professional interviewers to survey voters coming out of the polls, hoping to capture a more accurate sample of the electorate than two years ago. In that race, the exit polls showed Sen. John F. Kerry beating President Bush, largely because the surveys overrepresented Democratic voters.

At least one network said it happened again Tuesday.

In the middle of its election coverage, Fox News — one of the members of the consortium — announced that it was going to stop relying on the exit-poll data because its decision-desk analysts had discovered a Democratic bias of six to eight percentage points in many areas after comparing the survey results with the actual vote.

... None of the other networks echoed those concerns. Officials with Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International, the polling firms that administered the NEP surveys, could not be reached for comment.

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