Editing Exit poll (section)

==Problems==
Like all opinion polls, exit polls by nature do include a [[margin of error]]. A famous example of exit poll error occurred in the [[1992 United Kingdom general election|1992 UK General Election]] when two exit polls predicted a [[hung parliament]]. The actual vote revealed that [[Conservative Party (UK)|Conservative Party]] government under [[John Major]] held their position, though with a significantly reduced majority. Investigations into this failure identified a number of causes including differential response rates (the [[Shy Tory Factor]]), the use of inadequate demographic data and poor choice of sampling points.<ref>{{Citation |author=[[Market Research Society]]|publisher=Market Research Society|place=London|year=1994|title=The Opinion Polls and the 1992 Election: a Report to the Market Research Society }}</ref><ref>{{cite web |first=Clive |last=Payne |title=Election Forecasting in the UK |date=2001-11-28 |url=http://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/Politics/papers/2002/w8/forecast.pdf |access-date=2008-10-23 }}</ref>

Another example of this was the [[2024 Indian general election]], in which after the voting ended, exit polls showed that the incumbent [[Bharatiya Janata Party]]–[[National Democratic Alliance|NDA]] government of [[Narendra Modi]] would win 350 to 370 seats in the [[Parliament of India]] and thus a landslide, but the actual results showed the opposition's strong performance and led to the BJP failing to gain a majority on its own.

As exit polls require a baseline to compare swing against, they are not reliable for one-off votes such as the [[2014 Scottish independence referendum|Scottish independence referendum]] or the [[2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum|UK EU membership referendum]].<ref name="FT explanation" /><ref name="UK Polling Report" /> Because exit polls can't reach people who voted by [[postal ballot]] or another form of [[absentee voting]], they may be biased towards certain demographics and miss swings that only occur among absentee voters.<ref name="Warwick" /> For example, in the May round of the [[2016 Austrian presidential election]], exit polls correctly pointed to a narrow lead for [[Norbert Hofer]] among those who voted at a polling station.<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/22/austria-poised-to-elect-far-right-president-as-europes-populist/|title=Austria holds its breath as exit polls show far-Right candidate Norbert Hofer leads by the narrowest of margins |date=21 May 2016|access-date=10 June 2016|newspaper=The Daily Telegraph}}</ref> However, the postal votes (which made up about 12% of the total vote)<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36353200|title=Austria presidential vote: Run-off rivals face dead heat|date=22 May 2016|access-date=10 June 2016}}</ref> were slightly but definitively in favour of his rival [[Alexander Van der Bellen]], and ultimately gave Van der Bellen victory. This could be considered a non-U.S. example of [[blue shift (politics)|the phenomenon known as "blue shift"]] in the U.S.