Illinois Primary Results

[Mr. Morden]

When do the polls close?

7pm Central / 8pm Eastern

[Mr. Morden]

wpindicates that the exit polls are showing a Romney victory, but no specifics.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/post/illinois-election-officials-ballot-problem-will-likely-delay-gop-primary-results/2012/03/20/gIQAKp2pPS_blog.html#pagebreak

The media doesn't get access to the exit polling until 5pm Eastern.  The comment in that story is just speculative.  Along the lines of "Romney's probably far enough ahead that they'll be able to call this on exit polling and early results....once we actually have those."

[Mr. Morden]

Again, the media doesn't actually get access to the exit polls until 5pm, when Edison Media Research releases their early results to the media pool.  So any supposed numbers being reported before that are fake.  This is the way it's been in every single American election since 2006, following the 2004 exit polling fiasco.  Do we have to go over this every time?

[Mr. Morden]

Like I asked in the other thread, what are these turnout numbers comparing to?  Are they talking about combined turnout for the two parties, and comparing to past primaries?  Because that's not going to be very meaningful, since there's no Democratic contest this time.

[Mr. Morden]

I'm just really, really skeptical of Santorum making this especially close.  It's rare that I cannot think of a single compelling argument for Santorum overperforming his polls (beyond his normal very-slight overperformance)...but I see no signs of this happening here, nor any reason why it would.

But we'll see in 2 1/2 hours I suppose.

Fox is suppose to have them at 6:00 PM EDT.

But they're only going to release demographic data and such.  And stuff like "50% of left-handed dwarfs voted for Romney."  They don't release the toplines until polls close in the state.

[Mr. Morden]

Exit poll is now out:

http://edition.cnn.com/election/2012/primaries/epolls/il