WASHINGTON -- Hurricane Sandy may have shaken up the final week of the 2012 presidential campaign, but few realize how close the storm came to crippling the exit polling operation that was once again central to post-election reporting on who voted and why.What made the exit polls especially challenging this year is that Edison Research, the company that conducts the exit polls on behalf of the National Election Pool (NEP) consortium of the five television networks and the Associated Press, is in Somerville, N.J.