An exit poll is a poll of voters taken immediately after they have exited the polling stations. It is conducted by pollsters, usually private companies working for newspapers or broadcasters, to gain an early indication of how an election has turned out, as in many elections the actual result may take hours to count. Exit polls provide valuable information to political analysts and media networks who use exit poll data to project election winners. They are useful because they offer the public an early idea of which candidate is winning and how specific demographics voted. Exit polls are distinct from opinion polls in that they measure a voters response in real-time after the fact rather than predicting votes or opinions.

Exit polls are conducted by interviewers who stand outside polling places at randomly selected precincts across the country and approach voters at specific intervals as they exit, for example every fifth or ninth voter. Voters who agree to participate fill out a short, confidential questionnaire and place it in a ballot box. Interviewers phone in the results three times during the day. When a voter refuses to participate, interviewers note the gender and approximate age and race of that voter. This information is used to statistically adjust the exit poll to ensure that all voters are fairly represented in the final results.

Exit polls ask a range of questions, including who people voted for, their demographics, opinions about the candidates, and opinions on important issues. However, exit polls require a baseline to compare swing against, so they are not reliable for one-off votes such as the Scottish independence referendum or the UK EU membership referendum. Exit polls also cant reach people who voted by postal ballot or another form of absentee voting, so they may be biased towards certain demographics and miss swings that only occur among absentee voters.

In summary, an exit poll is a poll of voters taken immediately after they have exited the polling stations. It is conducted by pollsters to gain an early indication of how an election has turned out, and it provides valuable information to political analysts and media networks who use exit poll data to project election winners. Exit polls ask a range of questions, including who people voted for, their demographics, opinions about the candidates, and opinions on important issues. However, they require a baseline to compare swing against, and they may be biased towards certain demographics and miss swings that only occur among absentee voters.