Election rides on the 917 vote

wilheim · Oct 22, 2004

October 21, 2004

On Sept. 15, there were 168,900,019 cell phones in America, according to the cell phone institute in Washington.

Not one phone user was called by the political pollsters reporting with such marvelous accuracy on the Bush-Kerry race.

A month later, on yesterday afternoon, there now were 170,475,160 cell phones in America, according to the cell phone institute.

In one month, 1,575,000 new cell phones have been bought.

Not one cell phone has been called during the presidential campaign. This is because there is no method for polling cell phones. Nobody has their numbers. Nor do they know who the users are, where they live and what they do. You have 170 million phones and you talk to none of them and then try to say you know what the public is thinking.

A month ago, pollster John Zogby said he had discontinued telephone polls because cell phones had made any and all results meaningless. Now if you pay attention to polls, you are insane.

Yesterday, the polls showed a Bush surge. It never happened because they were basing it on thin air. There also were figures showing Kerry winning states like Ohio in the Midwest. They came up with the percentages without calling one cell phone of the millions and millions of them in the area. I believe nothing.

Everybody maintains that the two candidates are in a statistical dead heat. Nobody knows that. With a huge number of new registered voters, overwhelmingly of color, and young, and with 40 million using cell phones, the only thing going on in this election is how many times George Bush goes under before he drowns on Election Day. As he should. He is the worst president we have had, maybe ever.

Yesterday on the East Side of Manhattan, they counted 40,000 new registrations. You didn't need 10 of them, for this is a Kerry district, and state. But it showed the level of animosity toward Bush. I was at a book signing at Sarasota the other day, and 400 Democrats were there. A rare number. The next day, they raised $100,000 when Joe Biden appeared for Kerry. Over the last several weekends, groups have come down from Connecticut to go door to door for Kerry in Tampa. I saw cell phones everywhere.

The newspaper and television polls aren't worth glancing at. They are taken of people who have land lines, as your house phone is known. Many millions have cell phones and land lines both, and can be reached. But there are about 40 million between 18 and 29 who only use cell phones. They are heavily Democratic. The usual view is that they vote sparingly. This time, with the word "draft" in the air the young breathe, and with a general and intense dislike of Bush, the number should be higher than usual. Even if it is disappointing, the numbers are so huge to begin with that Kerry will be your president on a 917 vote.

Older people are Bush voters and they are deficient in making cell phone calls. When it buzzes, chimes or rings with an incoming call, they are breathless.

Yet the newspapers and television are running polls as if they are excerpts from textbooks at MIT. They are taken with 20th century methods for a 21st century political race. "Our scientific poll is based on interviews with 532 people, and has an error margin of 3 percent, one way or the other. Of course that makes 6 percent, but that's close enough for us."

They are lies by numbers. The reporters basing their coverage on these polls are lazy, unimaginative and irresponsible. That everything is based on an untruth could be the reason for the dreadful election coverage. What they write or say so often has nothing to do with the times in which they are supposed to live and report.

In the week ending Oct. 17, there were 23 American soldiers killed in Iraq. I saw no prominent mention anywhere. If there were 23 policemen killed in New York in a week, the city would shut down. If there were 23 police officers killed in the nation in a week, it would be a national calamity.

But the 23 dead American soldiers went virtually unmentioned. I watch the "Today" show and they say that now we are going to see all the good things happening in Iraq. Insanity.

I think common sense says that the issue of the campaign is the dead soldiers who are in Iraq because George Bush lied to get us into the war. Younger people might feel a little closer to a casket holding the young.

They talk on cell phones, and when they talk they say, "Where are you? Did you hear George Bush saying the jobs are improving? Where? And for how much? He is making this a $9-an-hour country. Did you hear his idea on Social Security? We can give it to a stock broker to steal. Did you hear him saying a word about the guys getting killed in Iraq? No. He wants to make like it never happens. So long. I'm going into the building, and I'm going to lose you."

Newsday inc.

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eek. · Oct 22, 2004

its actually illegal wil

The rise of mobile phones also raises concerns, since it is illegal in the US to phone mobiles for surveys,

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<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=629 border=0><TBODY><TR><TD colSpan=3>Treat polls cautiously, experts warn

</TD></TR><TR><TD vAlign=top width=416><TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=416 border=0><TBODY><TR><TD vAlign=bottom>By Richard Allen Greene
BBC News Online
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>

John Kerry won the third and final presidential debate by a convincing margin, bringing him even with George W Bush in the race for the White House, opinion polls suggest.

<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=203 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR><TD>

People increasingly only take the calls they want

</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>But can we trust these polls?

Experts warn that surveys should be taken with a grain of salt - particularly in a race as close as this one.

Michael Traugott, a senior researcher at the University of Michigan's Center for Political Studies, urges poll watchers to remember that surveys have a margin of error.

"A standard pre-election poll is of 700 to 1,000 people, which produces a margin of error of three to four points," he said.

That means the poll can only reliably detect a lead of six to eight points, he said.

Neither Mr Bush nor Mr Kerry has consistently pulled that far ahead in the race, which means all that polls can show is that the race is close - not who is leading.

Technology

And even when races are not this tight, changes in technology are raising problems for pollsters who rely on random telephone surveys.

"The big concern is that people have got quite clever at avoiding calls they don't want to take - caller ID, mobile phones, call forwarding," said Arthur Lupia, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan.

"Response rates on phone interviews are dive-bombing. Ten years ago, if you got 70% response, that was not a very good effort. Now people would jump for joy if they got 70%."

<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=208 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR><TD width=5>

</TD><TD class=sibtbg>

Election poll tracker

</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>Frank Newport, the editor-in-chief of the Gallup Poll conceded the point but said it did not affect the reliability of surveys.

"To date there is no evidence that a lowered response rate is introducing bias," Mr Newport said.

Anna Greenberg of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research said pollsters rang numbers repeatedly to ensure they got enough responses.

"Most pollsters call at least three times [to reach a number], and academics and government researchers will call up to 10 times," she said.

"Every person in the population that you care about has to have a probability of being pulled into the survey," she said.

<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=203 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR><TD>

Pollsters are not allowed to ring mobile phones in the US

</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>Telephone polls generally under-represent some portions of the population, such as lower socio-economic levels, Mr Traugott said.

The rise of mobile phones also raises concerns, since it is illegal in the US to phone mobiles for surveys, he added.

But Ms Greenberg says only 3% of Americans solely use mobiles.

"At the moment people are still pretty linked to their land lines," she said.

Weighting data

Once pollsters have completed their telephone surveys, they weight the data - trying to interpret the responses so they represent the population as a whole.

Each pollster uses different formulas, which are kept secret.

<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=208 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR><TD width=5>

</TD><TD class=sibtbg> Some people may be calling themselves Republican one week and Democrat the next

Frank Newport, Gallup

</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>Experts agreed that weighting data was an art, not a science.

There is a fierce debate in the field about whether to try to take party identification into account when weighting data.

The Gallup Poll does not, its editor Mr Newport said, because party identification "is not stable like race or colour of hair.

"Some people may be calling themselves Republican one week and Democrat the next," he said.

The Zogby polling agency, on the other hand, does try to control for party identification - and was one of very few to predict correctly that Al Gore would win the popular vote in 2000.

The head of Zogby International, John Zogby was unavailable for comment.

Polling experts say Gallup Poll results tend to lean Republican, while Zogby results lean Democrat.

Anna Greenberg said both approaches had merit.

"Gallup is right that party identification is an attitude, but Zogby is also right in that preference is stable over time. The real answer is somewhere in the middle."

Who votes?

Ms Greenberg raised another potential source of error: Pollsters tend to assume that voters in each election are like the ones that came before.

<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=208 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR><TD width=5>

</TD><TD class=sibtbg> The danger is that when newspapers and television sponsor polls, they have to write a story based on the poll

Anna Greenberg

</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>But there is controversy over how to identify likely voters.

Gallup, for example, asks respondents to answer seven questions, including whether they typically vote and if they voted in the last election.

But experts caution that trying too hard to identify likely voters could mean excluding first-time voters.

"If you are too strict about who you let into your survey, you miss out on some voters," Ms Greenberg said.

That could skew results in a year - like this one - when both parties are engaged in massive voter-registration drives.

While the experts admit that polling is an imperfect science, they also suggest the media may make surveys look less reliable than they are.

"The danger is that when newspapers and television sponsor polls, they have to write a story based on the poll," Ms Greenberg said.

All the experts agreed it was safer to rely on a series of polls than on any individual headline result.

"There is no question that polls are fairly reliable in interpreting changes in public opinion over time," said Vince Price of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

"Given the wide number of polls that are conducted, reading trends across polls is likely to lead to a conclusion. Some people complain about the large number of polls, but there is actually an advantage there." Of course, as the politicians say, ultimately there is only one poll that matters. It takes place on Election Day. 

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VOLTITAN · Oct 22, 2004

Wil, some validity to the argument, but I saw an interview with a pollster last night and he said that many people who only have a cell phone put that down as their only number and the cell number ends up on lists and so surveyors actually reach cell phone users sometimes. He also said the same thing as the article I posted. They just call more people and stay on the phone longer to ensure a good statistical sample.(Actually it appears Zogby does still use landline polls) I will agree though, this one is too close to call and with the polls going in all different directions and hanging around the margin of error I am not saying its in the bag for either candidate.

New trouble for political pollsters in caller ID, cell phones
Tuesday, October 12, 2004

By Bill Toland and James O'Toole, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Political pollsters are supposed to feast during a presidential election year. So why are so many of them worried that famine waits over the horizon

The reason is that people are getting harder to reach and survey response rates are getting lower. And they say it's only going to get worse.

Potential respondents screen calls with caller ID or answering machines and either don't pick up or don't return messages. Millions rely solely on cell phones and legally cannot be called for surveys. And millions of new voters have registered who may or may not be found by pollsters.

The problems are magnified because of the role polls now play in shaping the electorate's perception of a race, as well as in influencing a candidate's strategy and ability to raise money.

Nationally, about 6 percent of wireless phone users go without traditional land-line service, according to the Yankee Group, a communications research firm from Boston. The percentage approaches 12 percent among all people under 35 and rises to 14 percent among 18- to 24-year-olds. Cell numbers aren't listed in phone directories, and even if they were, pollsters are not allowed to call them.

So if these young, high-tech voters can't be reached, does that mean polls might be off by a point or two or three?

Maybe. Maybe not.

"The issue of the cell phones is a problem, but it's not a catastrophe," said Shawnta Wolcott, communications director for Zogby International, a top polling firm. "To compensate, [it] takes us a little longer to reach a balanced sample, so we just stay on the phones a little longer."

Eventually, she said, Zogby reaches enough younger voters to meet the poll's demographic criteria. The only way poll results could be tainted is if cell-phone-only professionals have different voting tendencies than landline users in the same age bracket, she said, and there's no evidence that this is the case.

For pollsters, it's a happy circumstance that 18- to 34-year-olds on the whole are less likely to vote than older Americans and therefore are less vital to the polling process.

Still, as the number of people who drop landline phones grows -- and assuming it remains illegal for pollsters to call mobile phones -- it will become increasingly difficult to conduct surveys.

Pollsters could face huge problems by the next presidential election in 2008, and by 2012 or 2016, the landline poll will have gone the way of the dodo.

Polling firms are constantly exploring the need to find new ways to reach the right people, and e-mail is gaining the favor with some in the industry. Zogby already uses "interactive polling" -- e-mails that direct poll participants to a Web site to answer questions -- but other firms, such as Gallup, aren't so sure about the reliability of Web polling.

The rise of random sampling

The American political poll was born in Pennsylvania, in 1824, when a Harrisburg newspaper tried to predict the presidential election, and since the beginning, there have been difficulties.

Straw ballots, which newspaper readers were asked to fill out and mail in, were unreliable. Canvass polls, where workers were sent to polling precincts, were marginally better.

It wasn't until the 1930s that scientific "sampling" -- the process of finding groups of random individuals who mirror the demographic characteristics of a given population -- became the method of choice.

Since then, the pollster's top challenge has been finding an accurate sample population, then getting in touch with those most likely to vote. Since World War II, the telephone has been the primary tool for conducting scientific surveys, but as the Chicago Tribune discovered, when it relied on poll results to craft its 1948 "Dewey Beats Truman" story, calling people on the phone has its limitations.

It turned out that people without telephones who couldn't be contacted had different voting patterns than people who had phones. Could the same eventually prove true of the cell-phone-only crowd?

"I don't think any of us know the answer to that," said Carroll Doherty, editor of the The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

Other obstacles to modern polling include screened calls, voice mail and caller ID. Women, blacks and people younger than 30 are more likely to block or not answer a call than someone older. The national and state Do Not Call lists lead to a lot of hang-ups on pollsters, who are allowed to call landline phones but are mistaken for telemarketers.

"People are dubious of pollsters to begin with because of privacy issues," Doherty said.

Response rates -- people who agree to answer questions -- have dropped to around 25 percent from nearly 40 percent a couple of decades ago, said Larry Jacobs, director of the 2004 Elections Project at the University of Minnesota.

The future of polling is hard to predict. Almost certainly, an alternative to the phone poll will be required. But will it be one that relies on the Internet? Face-to-face or door-to-door polling, which is extraordinarily expensive? Old-fashioned snail mail? Maybe a rewards-based system, in which prospective respondents are offered something of value in exchange for their time and opinions?

"Three elections from now, maybe we'll have one machine that will be the phone, Internet and TV," Doherty said. "Who knows?"

Even if pollsters sort out the technical challenges, they'll still face difficulty in figuring out which Americans are most likely to vote.

Polling is art and science

Polling is based on well-established statistical principles, but pollsters rely on art as well as science in trying to discern who will actually cast a vote.

Different polls use slightly different "screens,'' or series of questions, to determine who among their respondents are most likely to vote. The task is complicated by the fact that many people claim they will vote and then they don't.

Some sincerely plan to vote and simply don't get around to it. Others don't genuinely plan to vote, but will say "yes" because it seems the socially correct answer. As a result, questions designed to discern "likely voters" attempt to tease out a respondent's interest in the election, level of certainty about voting and voting history.

The respected Gallup Poll is among those that rely in part on past behavior. People are asked whether they know the location of their polling place and whether they voted in past elections.

One key question this year is whether the flood of newly registered voters -- more than 40,000 in Allegheny County -- will confound pollsters' expectations about the identities and tendencies of likely voters. Adam Clymer, political director of the National Annenberg Election Survey, said turnout among new voters is a potentially huge variable.

"I have a lot of sympathy for my colleagues who have to report the horse race number," Clymer said. "This represents a real challenge. We don't know how many people are going to vote, but most people think it's going to be substantially more.''

The classic example of voter turnout defying polls was Jesse Ventura's 1998 election as governor of Minnesota. A last-minute surge of support, much of it believed to have come from newly registered, nontraditional voters, brought him a stunning victory that no poll had predicted.

"In the case of Ventura, the reality on the ground changed overnight," said Jacobs, of the University of Minnesota. "The universe of voters destabilized in the last few days -- we saw a huge surge of voters that didn't vote in the past."

Brad Coker, managing director of Mason-Dixon Polling & Research, which conducts the Pennsylvania Poll for the Post-Gazette, said that while new, nontraditional voters were a factor in the Ventura race, their effect may have been exaggerated.

"There might have been some of that, some slackers who said, 'Hey, dude, let's go vote for Jesse,' " Coker said.

"But everyone forgets there was a widely carried debate the weekend before the election and Ventura just mopped the floor [with his opponents.] "That debate generated a lot of that enthusiasm for him. You could have been polling the right people [and] still missed a lot of that Ventura surge."

Jacobs said the Ventura race was "instructive but not a real useful guide" to current polling perils. But pointing to reports of widespread voter registration increases across the county, he said, "I do worry that some of the polls out there may not be capturing this higher level of voter interest."

Coker added a note of skepticism regarding how many of the highly touted new voters would actually show up on Nov. 2.

"Registering voters is one thing, getting them to turn out is another," Coker said. "Republican are working, the Democrats are working this real hard; we'll see if they can pull it off."

G. Terry Madonna, director of the Center for Opinion Research at Franklin and Marshall University, said he was not particularly concerned that a surge of new voters would elude his Keystone Poll or other reputable surveys when it comes to the presidential race.

"Presidential elections are easier to do in one sense because the turnout is so large that likely voters more closely mirror all voters," he said.

Madonna noted that a variety of different polling organizations have been taking the pulse of the Pennsylvania presidential race this year, with relatively consistent assessments over time.

"They're all showing the same election,'' he said.

Which remains too close to call.

Shotgun · Oct 22, 2004

Wil, how about posting who the columnist is that wrote the article? It's an opinion piece which explains the contradictions:

"A month ago, pollster John Zogby said he had discontinued telephone polls because cell phones had made any and all results meaningless. Now if you pay attention to polls, you are insane."

Volt's article says this about cell phones: "The issue of the cell phones is a problem, but it's not a catastrophe," said Shawnta Wolcott, communications director for Zogby International, a top polling firm. "To compensate, [it] takes us a little longer to reach a balanced sample, so we just stay on the phones a little longer."

Eventually, she said, Zogby reaches enough younger voters to meet the poll's demographic criteria. The only way poll results could be tainted is if cell-phone-only professionals have different voting tendencies than landline users in the same age bracket, she said, and there's no evidence that this is the case.

At a recent speech in Asia, Zogby was reported to have said:
* What is the impact of the increased use of mobile phones on the accuracy of polling?
* 6% of all adults and 15% of under 30s have only mobiles, with no land line phone. Does this introduce a bias in polling?

* Zogby has tested this and seen no reason to expect these mobile-only adults will be any different (i.e. there is no anti-liberal bias).[B}

Nowthis from Zogby's poll released today: The telephone poll of 1212 likely voters was conducted from Tuesday through Thursday (October 19-21, 2004). The margin of error is +/- 2.9 percentage points.

Looks like this columnist decided to create a few 'facts' out of thin air.