The poll that I would like to see
Aug. 25th, 2015 12:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thewayneThere's a problem with polling in the USA. Most of the polls are conducted by calling landlines. More and more people are ditching landlines in favor of cellphones. The majority of landlines are owned by older people who tend towards more conservative politics. So the nature of polling is going to produce results that skew towards conservatism.
Take, for example, my wife and I. We use cell phones exclusively. Technically we have a landline, but we don't have a phone connected to it, so we have no idea if anyone ever calls it (we had to get it to have Internet access). Additionally, I am registered Independent, so political parties wouldn't call me for my opinion. And I left my phone number off my voter registration so I wouldn't be called.
Not much can be done right now. You can't produce meaningful results by having publicly-accessible web sites because people will use bot software to skew the results, either with malice or for the laughs. If you ask people to register, then you're producing a self-selecting group and that also produces skewed results. If you got a large enough group to register on a site, on the order of millions, you could probably produce sufficiently randomized results to neutralize the self-selection bias, but you also have to send out invites to polls with one-shot encrypted URLs so that people can't monkey-wrench the results.
Would I participate in online polling? Definitely yes. Do I expect such a system to be created? Definitely no.
Take, for example, my wife and I. We use cell phones exclusively. Technically we have a landline, but we don't have a phone connected to it, so we have no idea if anyone ever calls it (we had to get it to have Internet access). Additionally, I am registered Independent, so political parties wouldn't call me for my opinion. And I left my phone number off my voter registration so I wouldn't be called.
Not much can be done right now. You can't produce meaningful results by having publicly-accessible web sites because people will use bot software to skew the results, either with malice or for the laughs. If you ask people to register, then you're producing a self-selecting group and that also produces skewed results. If you got a large enough group to register on a site, on the order of millions, you could probably produce sufficiently randomized results to neutralize the self-selection bias, but you also have to send out invites to polls with one-shot encrypted URLs so that people can't monkey-wrench the results.
Would I participate in online polling? Definitely yes. Do I expect such a system to be created? Definitely no.
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Date: 2015-08-27 02:56 pm (UTC)ISTR Rasmussen's polling tends to lean Republican, though it's been a while since I really followed the various outfits closely. Nate Silver has plenty to say on the matter, of course. ^_^