NEP to Release Edison/Mitofsky Report?

This morning, USA Today’s Mark Memmott reports that this week, Edison/Mitofsky, the firm that conducted the National Election Pool (NEP) exit polls, "will tell the news organizations that paid for them what, if anything, they think went wrong."

But will that report see the light of day? That, according to Memmott, "remains unclear:"

Edie Emery, a spokeswoman for the six-member media consortium that paid for the exit polls, says representatives from ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, NBC and the Associated Press want to review the report before making any decisions about what to make public.

The behind-closed-doors delivery of the report could come as soon as today. Because the report’s conclusions might not be made public, the report is unlikely to appease critics who say the six media companies have moved too slowly to release information collected in the exit polls and have said too little about possible problems with those surveys.

"It’s amazing to me that there’s even a possibility that the report won’t be released to the public," says Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. "There was a major national controversy involving the integrity of the news organizations and of the polling firms involved."

Deeper in the story, Memmott adds a bit more:

Warren Mitofsky and Joseph Lenski, two experienced pollsters hired before last year’s election to overhaul and run the exit poll system, have been reviewing whether their early work on Election Day was flawed. They and the six media companies have said almost nothing about that review…

The news groups defend their actions. Their position: Since they paid for the information to be gathered from voters, they can handle the data and questions about them as they see fit. They plan, Emery says, to follow past practice. That means information gathered by the exit pollsters – showing, for example, breakdowns in support for Bush and Kerry by age, gender and race – will soon be made public.

The story has more to interest MP readers about the exit poll controversy and some general thoughts about news media coverage of polling. Read it in full.

A cynical hunch:  The report will be released to the public, but at about noon on Thursday.   

A less cynical, more serious hunch:  The networks will release the report.  Moreover, breaking from past practice, the "raw data" that eventually lands at the Roper Center archives will include all the necessary weighting variables to allow scholars to replicate the "complete" exit poll results that Mitofsky and Lenski are reporting on that were not "corrected" to match the final vote tallies.  This will allow scholars to check the exit pollster’s conclusions and test their own hypotheses.   That’s mostly speculation, of course, but put me down as an optimist on this one.