Word: voter
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Well, maybe. As soon as the polls close, the networks will still try to call as many contests as possible, but they will be relying on a new system. The old organization that conducted exit polls and counted votes for the networks, Voter News Service (VNS), has been dissolved and replaced by the National Election Pool (NEP), a consortium of six news outlets: ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News and the Associated Press. Veteran pollster Warren Mitofsky led a group that overhauled VNS's computer models, factoring in, for instance, voting patterns from three previous elections instead of one. Mitofsky...
...country. A few pollsters, like Zogby, also weight for party identification, to make sure there's a representative number of Democrats, Republicans and independents in the sample. More traditional pollsters, including TIME's, believe that party ID is not a stable factor but varies according to which candidate the voter is supporting and how well the candidates are doing...
...pollsters sampling the whole country? Pollsters usually interview about 1,000 registered voters and, thanks to the magic of statistical math, 95% of the time those 1,000 accurately reflect the opinions of the entire country, give or take a margin of error of plus or minus 3%. But some people are not reached. Polls are conducted by phone, which leaves out about 8% of adult Americans, including those in institutions (prisons, hospitals, military bases), some low-income people and the approximately 4% of adults who have only cell phones. Then there are the people who hang up on pollsters...
...pollsters decide who is a "likely voter"? This is tricky. Pollsters assign each surveyed voter a score based on the answers to multiple questions (such as "Did you vote in the last election?") that indicate the likelihood that he or she will vote. The highest-scoring voters are deemed "likely." How high a score produces a "likely"? It depends. Pollsters first estimate what the turnout will be on Election Day and then designate the same percentage of their respondents--again, based on highest scores--as "likely." Assumptions of who will vote thus have an enormous impact on poll results (especially...
...democracy at its best, a million acts of persistence and persuasion, the underground war is democracy at its worst, designed not to express the will of the people but to subvert it. In one battleground state after another, accusations of dirty tricks are growing daily. Republicans focus on voter fraud and charge Democrats with rounding up homeless felons and plying them with drink to get them to register and vote, early and often. Democrats cry intimidation and argue that G.O.P. officials are trying to disenfranchise voters who oppose them. Both sides have plenty of ammunition and more than enough lawyers...