How we survey the electorate

The Voter Poll is an evolution of the exit poll that has been used by leading broadcasters for more than a half century. Conducted by SSRS for The Associated Press and a consortium including ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, MS Now and NBC, it combines the traditional in-person methodologies of the National Election Pool/Edison Research exit poll with the online innovations of AP’s VoteCast.  

The Voter Poll is conducted on behalf of AP and the leading U.S. broadcasters. AP allows customers of any size or category to benefit from its data and insights. 

Customers include media companies of all sizes and formats, as well as non-media users such as financial institutions, governments and nonprofit organizations. 

The Voter Poll provides trusted, timely insight into the underlying drivers of the results of U.S. elections, including the key issues, demographics and geographies behind both voter turnout and voter choices.

This data and insight is used by the media to explain the themes and trends that matter most to their audiences, on election night and beyond.

AP uses the data as a complement to tabulation data, so we can declare winners as quickly as possible.

Increasingly, it is also used by commercial, governmental and nonprofit organizations to inform planning, decision-making and predictive models.

Key benefits include:

• Data released as soon as polls close
• Readymade, embeddable graphics of key insights
• Custom crosstab tools
• Direct access to data by API
• Access to historical data for trend analysis

The Voter Poll is available for the 2026 and 2028 November general elections and presidential primaries. 

It includes data and visualizations at the national level and in all 50 states, as well as access to historic results from AP VoteCast and the National Election Pool/Edison Research Exit Poll. 

The Voter Poll is a comprehensive and innovative survey conducted in all 50 states that merges the methodologies of AP VoteCast and the Edison/NEP exit poll. The goal is to understand voters’ attitudes on key issues.  

The survey captures the opinions of all voters, no matter how they cast their ballot, using a combination of methods, including a large pre-election survey of verified voters and in-person interviews at voting precincts on election day.  

The Voter Poll is an evolution of the traditional exit poll that incorporates methodologies developed for AP VoteCast.  

While it answers the same questions about who voters chose and why, it is designed to better reflect the behavior of modern voters — who increasingly are voting early or by mail – while continuing to interview some voters in-person on election day. All respondents, including those who take the survey prior to election day, are verified as actual voters.