On Fri, 05 Nov 2004 08:38:26 -0700, Newps wrote:



Dave Stadt wrote:



You would be hard pressed to prove that. Polls are at best one step above a
WAG.

Science proves it. But, everything has to go right for the poll to
achieve that margin of error. First you must get a represenative random
sample. This rarely happens, there's always a little error here.
Second the questions must not be skewed one way or the other. Third,
the people must tell the truth. This also never happens. They always
give the margin of error when you see a poll, this is a theoretical
number that cannot be reached because no poll will ever be truly random,
somebody always lies, or says they're someone their not, etc. One of
the pollsters on TV this week said that to get the 850+ responses for a
+-3% poll they had to call over 10,000 people. With those kinds of
problems no way can a poll be anymore than a guess.

This is really a hoot. We wouldn't be talking about this at all if
the exit polls hadn't been so wrong. There's the proof. As to why
this happened, my theory is that there is a systematic bias error
because people who voted for Bush had better things to do with their
time than talk to the pollster. Same thing with the phone polls,
9,150 people were too busy to talk to the pollster and there is a
bias that affects the results in that.

Klein