When the UN monitors international elections, one way they determine if the election process is credible or fraudulent is to take exit polls and compare the actual results to those of the exit poll. Exit polls in America have always been accurate, confirming that our elections are allegedly fair and honest -- except in the two elections in which Bush was involved. Exit polling is the last semi-independent check of an election's accuracy and the only way to quickly determine if the votes cast for a candidate match those counted by electronic machines. E-voting is not publicly observable & is conducted  privately [more] and [more] From [HERE] Breaking from two decades of tradition, this year’s election exit poll is set to include surveys of voters in 31 states, not all 50 as it has for the past five presidential elections, according to multiple people involved in the planning.

Dan Merkle, director of elections for ABC News, and a member of the consortium that runs the exit poll, confirmed the shift Thursday. The aim, he said, “is to still deliver a quality product in the most important states,” in the face of mounting survey costs.

The decision by the National Election Pool — a joint venture of the major television networks and The Associated Press — is sure to cause some pain to election watchers across the country. (For a full list of the states that won’t have exit polls scroll to the bottom of this post.)

Voters in the excluded states will still be interviewed as part of a national exit poll, but state-level estimates of the partisan, age or racial makeups of electorates won’t be available as they have been since 1992. The lack of data may hamper election night analyses in some states, and it will almost certainly limit post-election research for years to come.