Looking for exit polls?

People I see keep asking me about exit polls, so just so you know there probably aren't any - or at least, none giving an early heads up of the result; the BBC or Sky may well have done some normal polling just to add colour to their coverage.

I haven't asked round the pollsters, but I'm fairly certain no one will do it. It would be illegal to publish any exit poll of the European elections until after 9pm on Sunday night (in 2004 the police even investigated Populus for publishing eve-of-poll figures from the three all-postal regions prior to the election, since they were effectively an exit poll).

However, since the votes are being counted earlier than that in most regions enabling the actual results to be reported shortly after 9pm, it would be rather a waste of money to pay for an exit poll that will only pre-empt the results by a couple of minutes.

While one could conduct and report an exit poll of the local election results, we've never seen exit polls for local elections in the past, so I doubt we'll see them now.

So, anyone looking for exit polls, I'm afraid there won't be any (though do check the comments below this, since following me summing up the final polls, and there being an extra final poll, I expect the first comment will end up being from a pollster saying "actually we're doing one!")