From The Post’s Steve Coll:
The exit poll numbers we have paid for and been provided simply do not add up. They are internally inconsistent in important ways. They also are out of whack with voting results in ways that are difficult to explain. One thesis being explored today is shorthanded as the problem of “female skew.” This refers to the fact that women are more likely than men to agree to be interviewed about their votes outside of polling stations. In fact, in the exit polls we received yesterday, there were more women in the sample than we expected to see in the final turnout. But the analysts handling this data believed that this distortion would not change the general trend of the poll and had been weighed to some extent by the poll’s managers. We need to review questions such as this one in greater depth, although one’s confidence that it will ever be possible to conduct accurate exit polls in the heat of a campaign such as the one we just had has to be shaken.