US election exit polls abandoned

America's television networks faced a rerun of election night embarrassment yesterday - two years after their spectacularly wrong calls of the 2000 presidential contest - when the main pollster withdrew its exit polls because it could not guarantee their accuracy.

The loss of the crucial tool in giving early insight into voting trends was especially damaging to coverage of the most competitive mid-term polls in half a century.

Voter News Service, a consortium which provides exit polls and results to the Associated Press news agency and CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox television services, said it scrapped its polls during balloting yesterday after discovering that glitches in the new computer system had not been ironed out.

A spokesman said that data collected from voters had not translated accurately into projections about demographics and the other trends important to the exit polls.

The withdrawal, announced just two hours before the close of voting in most states, comes at a time when American television broadcasters are at pains to demonstrate they had learnt from their mistakes of two years ago when they wrongly declared Al Gore the winner in Florida, and handed him the presidency.

Although there is tremendous competition between news anchors to reel off projections within minutes of the close of polls, networks had promised caution this year.

They said they would review data more fully before declaring the winners in individual races. The new openness was also a nod to the potential trouble that lay ahead because of the pollster's untested computer system.

The discovery of the untried system had not gone down well with the networks.

"This is the equivalent of a Nasa space shot without any test runs," Tom Hannon, the political director of CNN, told the New York Times.

"We are still testing the system," a spokeswoman for VNS said yesterday morning. "The system has been completely overhauled."

Anticipating kinks in the new computer system of VNS, television executives broadened coverage at counting centres once it became evident that the polling agency had not completed an overhaul of its system.

Analysis of the 2000 election debacle led to the blame being shared between VNS, for supplying bad data and under-estimating the absentee ballots in Florida, and the networks for over-reliance on the service.

Yesterday's elections were seen as especially difficult to call; they are the most competitive mid-terms in half a century and pundits were saying several races for Senate and governorships were too close to call.

Executives at some networks had decided to shell out for their own exit polls in pivotal races, or to send in extra reporters to counting operations. But none appeared to be conducting polling on a national scale

That means that network analysts on the night and newspaper reporters might not have enough information to discern voter trends across the country, and explain to viewers why the results are falling a certain way.