Explaining Election Day: How AP collects electorate data
From the Explaining Election Day: Understanding the processes from voting to declaring winners series
After an election, vote results tell you who won, but they don't tell you about the people who voted in that election, what they thought of the candidates or the issues, what really mattered to them while they were casting their ballots. In other words, they don't tell you the why of the election. That's the reason that the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and The Associated Press created AP Vote Cast. AP VoteCast is a comprehensive survey that tells you what's on voters minds. It is different from an exit poll, which relies mostly on in-person interviews that are conducted outside of polling places after people have cast their ballots. It uses mail, phone and online interviews to capture the views of voters regardless of whether they voted on Election Day or before, in-person or by mail.
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