UNL's McCutcheon part of elite team to track voting

Released on 10/29/2004, at 2:00 AM
Office of University Communications
University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Lincoln, Neb., October 29th, 2004 —

The mistaken voting projections in Florida in the 2000 election have spurred the media and pollsters to act to prevent a recurrence this Election Day, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Allan McCutcheon will be part of the team aiming to make that happen. He is one of 12 national experts who will gather in Somerset, N.J., to collect results and pass projections onto electronic and print media.

McCutcheon is professor of statistics and sociology at UNL, a survey research scientist and director of the Gallup Research Center. He also chairs the graduate program in survey research and methodology at UNL. He has worked on pre-election polling for The Gallup Organization, worked on the advisory board of the Gallup polls, and conducted polls in Europe.

McCutcheon will be part of the efforts of Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International to provide exit poll analysis. Warren Mitofsky is the developer of the field of exit polling and was the founding director of the CBS News poll.

The effort is funded by the National Election Pool, composed of ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN and more than 1,500 newspapers nationwide. This national pool was responsible for getting Mitofsky to come on board, McCutcheon said. In the 10 U.S. presidential elections Mitofsky has overseen, his group has never called a state wrong.

In order to avoid another Florida, more supplemental information will be gathered this time, McCutcheon said. Information from exit polls, which will be compiled first, will be paired with actual vote tallies from precincts and counties. Projections will be made for each race in a state after all the polls in the state are closed.

Nearly 5,000 people will be required to perform exit polling, gather information from the workers in the field, analyze the computations and perform many other tasks.

All statistical models used in 2000 have been improved, quality control procedures are more sophisticated, and the computer system is new and extensively tested, McCutcheon said.

Mitofsky was called back from retirement because of errors by the previous polling group, the Voter News Service, when Florida in 2000 was first called for Gore, then for Bush, then retracted altogether.

"This election is even more contentious," McCutcheon said. Lawsuits have already been filed regarding the voting process.

McCutcheon and his fellow researchers will be taking in information from all 50 states and the District of Columbia and will call 34 senatorial, 11 gubernatorial and state-level races in states that have a single congressional seat or high-profile amendments. Nebraska amendments won't be tracked.

McCutcheon and the team will begin meeting on Sunday morning in Somerset. He said preparation for the polling took him back to his student days, as material in a 50-page manual full of page after page of equations describes how the data will be used and processed.

The election will be a marathon session for the analysts, who have been warned they will get only two to three hours of sleep in 36 hours.

"This will go on well into the night, since many races are very, very close," McCutcheon said.

CONTACT: Allan McCutcheon, Director, Gallup Research Center, (402) 458-2035