Coronado High School students announce results of exit polls

While elections have come and gone, Wednesday students at Coronado High School announced the results of their exit polls.

Students interviewed thousands of El Pasoans after they voted.

The group called “We (fill in the blank)” have encouraged their fellow students to be involved in the election process in one way or another.

We(fillintheblank) has hosted debates with political leaders and have even been mentioned in the Washington Post about their exit polls.

“We(fill in the blank) is comprised of about 20 members,” Mercedes Munoz said

“We try to get the youth as involved as possible in politics,” added Sheridan Crenshaw.

The group has hosted debates for El Paso’s highest leaders. They were recently asked to attend and be part of the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin –a festival that includes the who’s who in politics.

Before elections the group organized several students to help with the unscientific exit polls.

“Over the two weeks we had 200 students,” We(fillintheblank) member Ishank Arora said.

The students conducted polls on the first day of early voting, a Saturday on early voting and the day of the elections.

“We conducted over 6,000 (polls),” said Munoz.

Munoz tells ABC-7 they weren’t just looking for the typical “Which candidate are you voting for?”

“We asked questions such as; looking in the future do you think that the United States is going in the right direction or the wrong direction?,” Munoz said.

So what did they find?

“It seems like El Pasoans have a much more optimistic attitude towards the direction the country is going as opposed to most Americans,” Munoz said.

Another interesting find for the students in this dawn of social media.

“The majority of the way people receive their information is through traditional media which is news, paper, TV, radio … so people can argue that’s dead in the 21st, century no one reads the newspaper anymore, no one watches the news, everyone just goes to Facebook and shares posts but that’s actually untrue,” Munoz said.

The students tell ABC-7 the best thing about conducting the exit polls is that they got 200 students to experience elections and become familiar with the process and that’s the whole point of the We(fillintheblank) group.