• InFerNo@lemmy.ml
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      23 hours ago

      I’m not familiar with the concept of an exit poll. I will look it up.

      • Gestrid@lemmy.ca
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        17 hours ago

        An exit poll is conducted after a voter exits the voting booth. It’s conducted by a private organization (usually either a news organization or someone working in collaboration with a news organization) and polls people to find out how they voted. The exit poll is voluntary.

        Organizations can then categorize that info based on age, gender, race, area where they voted, and other details. News organizations can then use that info (along with a bunch of other data, including polls conducted leading up to the day of the election) to extrapolate who will win an election in a given area. Typically, despite being somewhat limited in their scope (not everyone at every polling location nationwide is polled), the exit polls are usually reflective of the actual election polls.

        Campaign organizers for the next election can also use the data to help figure out their strategies for the next election. For a general example (I came up with it off the top of my head), “We failed to gain the aged 60+ black male vote in this state. We need to study how to appeal to them better in the next election.”

        Fun Fact: The actual official votes actually take days to count. So these and other types of election polls really help news organizations predict the results even just a few hours after the election polls close, and they’re rarely wrong. Sometimes, they’re even able to call an election the minute the polls in that area close*. These news organizations often each crunch their own numbers, too, so they don’t necessarily all rely on each other’s data.

        *I should note that each state has its own rules about how and when they release election results. Often, to avoid influencing voters who haven’t voted yet, they won’t release results (including results from early voting) until polls in the entire state have closed. This is usually the case with news organizations announcing their predictions, too. That’s why some news organizations are able to immediately predict some races as soon as the polls close.

      • Hacksaw@lemmy.ca
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        19 hours ago

        Why do you accept that young men voted for Trump. But when you’re told, using the same source of data, that white women did too suddenly you’re all questions?

        • InFerNo@lemmy.ml
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          13 hours ago

          In my country voting is anonymous, how would anyone know based on their sex or color or whatever how anyone voted. Here, your vote is considered private so asking a person how they voted as they walk out the polling station is just a foreign concept to me.

          What’s even weirder is how you came to your conclusions. You really have to explain the mental gymnastics you used, because you’re really coming out of nowhere.

          • Tartas1995@discuss.tchncs.de
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            11 hours ago

            Hey, I think his point is rather simple and don’t require much mental gymnastics, if you are a little generous in reading it by ignoring how it is phrased.

            His thought process is,

            You saw the meme and there is no comment or expression by you towards how they knew men voted for trump. You seemingly just accepted it but when I express the 52% statement, you correctly doubted my words and expressed interest in how people would know. Why did the potentially photoshopped screenshot from some random news channel with similar information, didn’t trigger the same response in you?

            Ofc it is flawed to assume that you weren’t wondering about that when looking at the meme. For all everyone else knows, you saw me as someone who could tell you as I was presenting similar information. So their hostility wasn’t proper. But the core of the question might be interesting for yourself, which is why I try to communicate it better.

            If you weren’t wondering about the method of obtaining the data in the meme, you might want to reflect on why.

            • InFerNo@lemmy.ml
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              4 hours ago

              If you weren’t wondering about the method of obtaining the data in the meme, you might want to reflect on why.

              Literally what started this chain of replies, me asking how one gets these numbers. I learned how Americans come to these numbers now, I just feel there’s some hostility in some of the replies simply for not knowing how something works but wanting to learn. It was simply the comment where I again saw someone mention numbers and now I really wanted to know where the numbers originated. I could have asked the same question in a top comment but I think the place where I asked is kinda irrelevant.