It’s not easy to decide which exit poll to trust and which one to take with a pinch of salt. One clear test of the reliability of exit polls is if the agency has released state-wise vote share figures or not. It is from these vote share figures that seat predictions are made. Therefore they are a far more fundamental part of any exit poll and much less prone to errors than seat predictions.
Only two polls have prominently displayed state-wise vote share figures: CVoter’s exit poll and Lokniti-CSDS’ post-poll survey. Most of the other polls haven’t cared to make their vote share predictions public. So purely from a methodological point of view, these polls need to be taken more seriously than others, irrespective of how close they are to the final results.
Let’s take a look at the state-wise vote share by CSDS and CVoter. The differences and similarities in the two polls are both important.
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