Are polls accurate?

Question

Are polls Accurate?

AND.....

Are "exit polls" (taken as people leave the voting booths) random or stratified sampling?

Answer 1

no

Answer 2

they are typically very accurate. They don't just ask people who they voted for, they ask what issues were most important to them, and which candidites they felt were best on those issues.

There is a lot of math and statistics behind polls. When they say there is a poll with a certian percentage margin of error, they are talking about statisics based on the number of people surveyed, the more people surveyed, the closer the poll result will come to the actuall election result.

For example if a poll says 60% of people support something and says it has a 5% error, then the math would prove that almost everytime the actuall result would be somewhere between 55% and 65%

Answer 3

It depends on the raw data. If the company will not release the questions asked then often the people paying for the poll or survey are looking for a particular result. This is true of opinion polls. If you are just asking for whom did you vote? Then the polls are very accurate.

Answer 4

It depends on how it's conducted and how the data is reported. Polls from companies like Zogby, Gallup and Rasmussen are generally pretty accurate. There is an interesting web site called www.pollingreport.com which shows the results of polls conducted by several companies covering a wide range of subjects. It also explains the methodology used in polling.

Answer 5

Quite accurate. Polling is more of a math science than a process of just asking questions. Pollsters devise strategies of where to ask the questions, how to frame the question, and how many folks in certain areas to ask. Polls just go to show that folks are predictable.

Answer 6

These days poll's are usually quite acurate and exit polls will be done on a broad specturm to give an acurate account for the whole population

Answer 7

The answer here is SOMETIMES. Like you are lucky sometimes when you gamble and sometimes you are not. Polls can give drastically different results simply by changing the wording of a question. So polls are sometimes accurate and sometimes are not.

Answer 8

polls can be absolute lies, it depends on whose doing the polling. anyone can do a poll. if you think bush sucks as i do, and you want a bias poll, you only poll those whom you know already hate bush. happens all the time.

Answer 9

50% of people asked said yes