Anyone who’s sat up watching the TV on election night knows there’s a pattern to how things go: before the polls close, early in the evening, broadcasters assiduously say as little as possible to avoid breaking election broadcasting rules.

Then comes 10pm, and the polls close. Moments later, the anchor behind the desk (almost always a Dimbleby of some description) gives the results of the exit poll – often the only bit of red meat to talk about for the next several hours.

Except, as the polls close in the Scottish referendum, this won’t happen – as neither the BBC nor any other media outlet has bothered to pay to get one done.

Exit polls are the best form of voting-related data we can ever get our hands on. They’re collected by large numbers of researchers standing outside polling stations and asking tens of thousands of people how they voted – as well as collecting a little demographic information, such as age, gender, race or social class.

The most visible outlet for the results of this (quite expensive) work is in the first hours after polls close: it gives a snapshot of the result while the laborious work of actually counting the votes is done.

As we won’t start to see the referendum results start to trickle in until at least 2am, without an exit poll broadcasters will have to fill the first four hours of their coverage with … what, exactly? This “poll” of Grindr users might be as good as anything else we’ve got (about 53-47 against independence, if you were wondering).

Why no exit poll for such a momentous and consequential vote? The first possibility is that no one thought the vote would be close, and so deemed it as not interesting enough to be worthy of the spend.

More likely, hopefully, is that the broadcasters were afraid of the consequences of a poll being wrong: if the BBC spends four hours discussing a poll that’s 51-49 in favour of yes, and when the final votes come in the result is no, deputy heads may roll amid the backlash.

In reality broadcasters may have been too cautious: campaigns are very familiar with arguing against exit polls they don’t like. The exit polls for the 2010 general election were very accurate, but disagreed with regular polls suggesting a Lib Dem surge. Early in the evening, many suggested the polls might be wrong and we should wait for the results – which in time confirmed the exits.

While the story in the 1992 general election was very different – the exit polls suggested a Labour win, which did not pan out – the experience has taught everyone caution in how they are handled. Even though a referendum, unlike elections, is without precedent, making weighting a poll tricky, more information is better than less.

But it’s not on election night itself when we will miss having an exit poll. Today, Scotland is making a momentous decision, which could end the 307-year history of the union – and because there’s no exit poll, we’ll all be guessing when it comes to working out how the decision was made. We can’t, of course, use the actual ballots for this as they’re anonymous.

If the polls turn out to be wrong, and yes wins, we won’t know whether it’s because 16- to 17-year-olds, given the vote for the first time, turned out en masse, or whether it’s because of a last-minute change of heart among pensioners (who currently lean towards no).

This detail and data is what lets academics, journalists and politicians alike work out what really happened and how voters act. No other way of getting the information is nearly as reliable.

One way or another, Scottish voters will make history today. For the sake of saving a few tens of thousands of pounds, we’ll never really know why the vote turned out the way it did. We’ve been sadly short-changed.