'New' exit polling debuts today

By Seattle Times news services

	CHUCK KENNEDY / KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS Sen. John Edwards addresses a crowd yesterday in Manchester, N.H. Today's primary, the first of the 2004 election season, will mark the first official test of the media's new exit-polling system.
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CHICAGO — Today's vote in New Hampshire marks the official start of the 2004 election season — Iowa held caucuses and not elections last week — and thus the first official electoral test of the National Election Pool (NEP), the successor to the much-maligned Voter News Service (VNS).

VNS was the consortium of news organizations — ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, Fox News Channel, CNN and The Associated Press — that provided exit polling and analysis during the 2000 elections and helped lead off a monthlong electoral debacle by mistakenly calling Florida for Al Gore, followed hours later by premature projections that Bush won.

The organization survived criticism after 2000, only to stumble in the 2002 midterm elections, when its computer system failed, leaving the networks — and viewers — with no exit polling data. That spelled the end of VNS and the beginning of the NEP.

The NEP is a consortium of news organizations — ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, Fox News Channel, CNN and The Associated Press — that will provide exit polling and analysis during the 2004 primary season and elections.

What's the difference?

Not much.

The NEP will get its exit-polling data from Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International, two research firms.

Warren Mitofsky, a polling expert who founded the predecessor to VNS but was working as a consultant to CBS and CNN during the 2000 election, said that aside from some minor alterations, he will be using the same techniques and statistical models VNS had always used. "These are the same models," he said. "I would say the changes are subtle."

Among those changes is an increased emphasis on accounting for absentee ballots, the volume of which in Florida caught VNS off guard in 2000, and what Mitofsky said is (in all likelihood) a more durable computer system than that of VNS.

The NEP also divides data-collection duties, putting the collection and tabulation of actual vote counts in the hands of The Associated Press.

But Mitofsky acknowledged the system is essentially a refined and updated version of what VNS was doing in 2000.

Mitofsky and Edison Media Research will gather and analyze exit-poll data and make projections. The networks will take that information and decide themselves whether to declare a winner on the air.

Talk about the new system came as the Democratic presidential hopefuls prepped for today's vote. Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the leader in polls, abandoned his front-runner's perch long enough to take a shot at his rivals on abortion. Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, convinced he was bouncing back from his third-place Iowa finish, questioned Kerry's judgment on foreign policy and spoke of unspecified "dirty tricks."

A spokesman later said Dean referred to anonymous phone callers who, among other things, are telling voters the former governor claimed to be a Christian when his wife and children are Jewish.

Even Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, who has shunned most negative campaigning, compared his relatively short time in Washington to Kerry's decades on Capitol Hill. "If we want real change in America, it's my belief that we need someone who's not a Washington insider," he said.

The last-minute exchanges marked a shift in the mostly positive tone of the New Hampshire race, which featured none of the attack advertising that seemed to backfire in Iowa.

The order of finish will likely prove crucial as the race changes overnight, from the close-quarter scuffling in New England to a battle across seven states reaching nearly coast to coast.

While most polls gave Kerry a comfortable lead over the second-place Dean, they also showed a hard-fought race for third place among Edwards, retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark and Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.

Material from the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times is included in this report.

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