Today, a dedicated crew of Current reporters and Northwestern University journalism students is fanning out across Cook County to conduct exit polls.
Starting in about an hour, we'll bring you a running tally on who's pulling ahead in the Cook County board president's race, as well as which Democratic U.S. Senate and gubernatorial candidates are performing well in Cook County.
Before we get the party started, though, here's a couple of preliminaries aimed at anyone who's not a polling geek.
First, exit polls are like weather forecasts. They're interesting and useful and occasionally right on the money. But when Tom Skilling says there's an 80% chance of rain, he's going to be wrong (and tan) two out of ten times.
Same deal with exit polls. We're shooting for a 95% confidence interval and a 5% margin of error, which is an oft-used benchmark for these sorts of things. But that means we'll be dead wrong in one of every 20 polls. So there's a chance today's polling numbers won't resemble the election results at all.
Disclaimer #2: We'll be posting results throughout the day to give you an idea of how the election's going. It's like watching a randomly selected series of plays from a football game that's not over yet.
We hope it's a valuable stream of information, but remember that it's not the final score.
Lastly, don't use this information to decide whether to vote today.
All sorts of things can happen during the final hour or two of an election. I'd hate to see your dream candidate make a last-minute surge that ends one vote short because you looked at our poll and stayed home. Vote already!
As the polls close, we'll be projecting the results of statewide races using an additional sample of precincts across Illinois. Hopefully that'll allow us to give you an early line on winners and losers. The above caveats apply to those forecasts too.
Stay tuned.
Windy Citizen 