From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Bob Garfield. Right now,

we're bracing ourselves for another exit poll debacle. It's been a terrible decade for exit pollsters.

In 2000, shame reigned down on the now-defunct voter news service when it called Florida for Gore.

In 2004, leaked poll data showed Kerry surging until he lost.

This year, the exit poll data will come from the national election pool,

a consortium of the five major networks and the Associated Press,

each of which will have people sequestered with the incoming information.

Joe Lensky is one of the founders of Edison Media Research, which, along with Motovsky research, will conduct the polls.

Lensky says they figured out how to cure the two biggest problems plaguing exit polls.

One, the overcounting of Democratic voters,

because young Democrats are more responsive to the usually young exit pollsters,

and two, all those awful leaks.

The first thing we did, starting in 2006,

the news organizations established what they call a quarantine room,

and that means there are three representatives from each of the six news organizations in that room, and they

are the only people allowed to review the Exipole data before 5 p.m. Those people give up any ability

to communicate to the outside world, so their cell phones, their Black their Blackberries any other communication devices are confiscated and their jobs are

to review the data before it's released to the rest of the news organization at 5

p.m. That has helped both in 2006 and the 2008 primaries to keep a handle on the

distribution of the Exip poll data until much closer

to poll closing time.

And the overrepresentation of Democrats' problem?

...