Since the fall of 2014, students in a Carroll College class on Elections have been running exit polls on Election Day. We use single-page surveys with the questions designed by Carroll students and Dr. Street, who teaches in the Political Science department. We cover polling places across Lewis and Clark County. In 2018 we also went to Billings and Great Falls, and in 2020 we ran a mail survey of Cascade, Lewis and Clark, and Yellowstone counties.
Students then write research papers based on the data collected, allowing them to test out their ideas about why people vote the way they do, and also to apply the statistical tools that they have learned in class to understand real-world data.
In 2018 and 2020 Dr. Street worked with Montana PBS to publish the results. Here is a link to the 2020 show!
