Even before polling places lock their doors, hungry press outlets fueled by the rumor mill of Twitter will begin touting exit polls as if they’re set in concrete, sowing confusion about certified tallies, undermining confidence in elections, and spawning conspiracy theories.

“May I be the first to say ‘Mr. President’?” is a good quote to keep in mind if you find yourself scrolling through headlines. Based on exit poll data, consultant Bob Shrum made that infamous remark on Election Night 2004, jumping the gun with the Democratic presidential nominee, Senator Kerry of Massachusetts.

When President George W. Bush prevailed, some tinfoil hat types insisted that the exit polls were real and the certified vote tallies fake. ABC News reported, “Based at least in part on these conspiracy theories, three Democratic congressmen have written a letter to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.”

The doubts even prompted some Congressional Democrats to question the validity of the election results — prefiguring some of the Republican skepticism over the 2020 election results. A Mississippi Congressman, Bennie Thompson, who later became chairman of the January 6 Committee, was among these Democrats. 

On January 6, 2005, Mr. Thompson voted to “object to the counting of the electoral votes of the State of Ohio,” PolitiFact reports, “on the ground that they were not, under all of the known circumstances, regularly given.”

Mr. Thompson and other Democrats pointed to a report that contended there were “numerous, serious election irregularities” in the 2004 election, particularly in Ohio, leading to “a significant disenfranchisement of voters.”

As late as 2020, Politico reported that some of these so-called election deniers were still insisting Mr. Kerry had won in 2004, refusing to accept that the exit polls just hadn’t caught the results with any more accuracy than polls during campaigns, which is why we don’t declare the winner based on polls.

Exit polls also did damage in 2000. News networks declared voting closed in Florida and called it for the Democratic nominee, Vice President Gore, while the state’s panhandle — in another time zone — still had an hour left to vote.

President Carter did something similar in 1980, conceding to President Reagan while voters were still in line on the West Coast. The New York Times reported, “Several Democratic legislators … blamed Mr. Carter’s early concession for their losses.”

The 1996 GOP presidential nominee, Senator Dole of Kansas, repeated a version of this voter suppression. His campaign released a concession at 9:30 PM on the East Coast only to retract it an hour later. The original plan had been to fax it out five minutes after California closed shop.

This year, it’s wise to expect exit polls and final results to be even further apart. President Biden has spent months accusing Republicans of everything from “semi-fascism” to “white supremacists” and a “threat to democracy.” With such a torrent of invective, voters will be shy about telling pollsters they support the GOP, which has been the case during previous cycles.

In a report that dug into how surveys had gotten it so wrong in 2004, the Washington Post reported “procedural problems compounded by the refusal of large numbers of Republican voters to be surveyed led to inflated estimates of support for John F. Kerry…”

Factors such as reluctance to speak to pollsters or to give them accurate answers underscore why reports are best taken with a healthy dose of skepticism and not be allowed to influence anyone’s plans to vote or their acceptance of certified results.

Polls are often used to fill airtime or to shape public opinion rather than reflect it. Elections are the only time citizens can check them against hard results, and even then, the press can employ a version of the excuse they use after hyping a big storm that doesn’t materialize: “Nobody can predict the weather!”

Upsets happen in politics as often as it rains when a forecast calls for sun. Polling isn’t an exact science, and the lead can swing back and forth many times before we crown a victor. The image of President Truman in 1948 holding aloft the Chicago Tribune’s front-page story, “Dewey Defeats Truman,” testifies to this fact.

These are all precedents to remember tonight with each breathless, click-bait report. Pollsters, reporters, and — except for the bots — the people on Twitter are as flawed and prone to wishful thinking as Mr. Shrum was in 2004. He had lost seven presidential campaigns before Mr. Kerry’s; desperate for a win, he spiked the football on the one-yard line, and retired from politics on a blunder, with a lifetime record of 0-and-8.  

Tonight, the best bet is to have a healthy dose of skepticism about reports, and regardless of what is reported, to go and cast your vote at the ballot box. Because as the old saying goes, Election Day is the only poll that matters.