“Where’s group 108?” shouted David Sturgess, a student volunteer for the Utah Colleges Exit Polls, as he and his student team tried to keep track of hundreds of students reporting survey results on election day at the exit poll headquarters on BYU campus.
Every two years, Utah college students gather from all over the state to create Utah’s exit poll. An exit poll is a survey randomly distributed at voting stations on election day. The survey asks voters their views on various topics and attempts to predict the final verdict on the issues before the official results come in.
“Exit polling happens in almost every state,” student volunteer Cate Stolworthy explained with a smile, “but Utah’s one-and-only exit poll is this one.”
Of the 600 volunteers, more than 400 came from BYU campus, and a large portion came from the BYU Department of Statistics. Although many hours were spent in organizing the event, statistics students, like Adam Jackman, still had to work long hours that Tuesday to pull everything together.
“We started at 5:00 a.m. and have been going since. Full steam,” said Jackman at 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday night. Most students didn’t return to their own homes until after 11:00 p.m. that night.
Despite the long hours, Brittany Spencer, a graduate student in the statistics program, said she’d definitely do it again.
“It’s really neat seeing a big project like this come together,” she said, “even if it seems a little hazy along the way!”
While the event was a fun experience for everyone involved, Spencer said that it was also a great way for the statistics students to apply what they’ve been learning.
“Instead of just sitting there learning theory, we’re actually doing it!”
Producing a top-notch exit poll survey like this isn’t easy, however. Professor Dan Williams, who has been the lead statistics faculty member on the event for four years, explained, “It takes a lot of preparation. Once we finish this poll up, we start planning for the next one, two years away.”
And that preparation certainly paid off this year. The exit polling student team was seven for seven in their predictions. These seven don’t include three other political races that the team termed “too close to call.” Even in these instances, however, the exit poll’s information held true and did indeed predict the correct final results. Professor Dan Williams was very pleased with how his statistics students worked in the event.
He said, “When it comes down to the bottom line, the students have done a major project. . . . We had some issues . . . but we did it!”