Sign HuffPost's Say "No" to Pollsters Petition!

Today's political landscape is littered with politicians and reporters addicted to treating polling results as if Moses just brought them down from the mountaintop. Since we can't expect these polling junkies to kick the habit on their own, we've decided to stage an intervention. And it's as easy as hanging up your phone. If enough of us refuse to answer pollsters' questions, their data will become so unreliable even the media would have to admit it was useless. --Arianna Huffington

Step 1: Sign this petition and take the pledge to Say "No" to Pollsters!

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*State:	AL AK AZ AR CA CO CT DE FL GA HI ID IL IN IA KS KY LA ME MD MA MI MN MS MO MT NE NV NH NJ NM NY NC ND OH OK OR PA RI SC SD TN TX UT VT VA WA WV WI WY
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Step 2: Add the Petition Badge to your Site
<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/01/11/sign-huffposts-say-no-_n_81136.html"><img src="http://images.huffingtonpost.com/gen/9227/original.jpg" border="0" alt="Sign the Petitino"></a>

Check back often to see the number of people who join this movement!

To read Arianna's full blog post on the petition, click here.

Step 3: Roll over the map to see the number of people who have signed by state
3789 People have signed this petition.

Comments

[TUCANOFULANO]

When pollsters phone and actually connect with one of the many persons in this household the SOP is to tell the polster to hold while the person they wish to speak to is sought,and the "hold" button is pushed on while a timer starts counting how long we've kept that particular pollster from
telephoning and bothering numbers of others. So far this election cycle the record-holder is a Clinton operative at 6.25 minutes on "hold"

[maxfusion]

Why, after all it's the exit polls in Florida that you wackos point to as proof the election was stolen in 2000. That was just 3 points, nothing close to the twelve Obama had before Hillary bused in folks from N.Y. and stole the election.

[AKJM]

Seem like a good idea, but it is not. Polls are like a canary in a coal mine.

[c0marts]

Don't just say no. Lie to the polsters! Confuse and embarass them.

[Bad actor]

I take all polls with a grain of salt. It all boils down to who is asked; therefore, the outcome can be slanted. It is just an effort by a sponsor to sway opinion. I consider answering questions from a pollster a waste of time. It is even less reliable than the Diebold machines. An individual has no assurance that his/her answer is accurately recorded. Headlines also are slanted much of the time.

[OriginalDave]

In this age of voter caging, hackable voting machines (what really happened in New Hampshire?), etc., polls may be one way for us to tell when election results are fraudulent, so I don't think this no-polls idea is particularly useful.

[truth01]

Polls are not the problem.

Voting machines and/or vote counting machines using super secret software run by corporations with incentive to falsify the results are a problem.

Polls are a defense against voter fraud.

Are you "fearless" enough to call instead for voting systems that we can trust?

[seamusnh]

I live in NH and we get calls all the time. My wife and I do not take part in any of them. Most of my friends in neighbors tell pollsters to get lost when they call. We are sick of the calls (a huge volume every 4 years) and do not believe that the media's reporting on polls should influence voters....

[jsh1120]

Sorry. I disagree completely. The elimination of scientific polling or, even worse, an effort to make it less accurate will do nothing to prevent candidates from attempting to gauge the views and mood of voters. And it shouldn't. Politicians in any democracy seek to determine what message will gain them office. If polls are not available, they will simply fall back on the time honored tradition of listening to less reliable sources of information.

And since when is a democracy served by having representatives who ignore the views of their constituents or misunderstand them. Isn't that a central complaint about the Bush administration?

[Chris637]

This is a BAD idea.

A couple of quotes from Wiki’s page on exit polls:

Exit polls have historically and throughout the world been used as a check against and rough indicator of the degree of election fraud. Some examples of this include the Venezuelan recall referendum, 2004, the Ukrainian presidential election, 2004, and the 2004 U.S. presidential election controversy.

In some instances, problems with exit polls have encouraged polling groups to pool data in hopes of increased accuracy. This proved successful during the 2005 UK General Election, when the BBC and ITV merged their data to show an exit poll giving Labour a majority of 66 seats, which turned out to be the exact figure. This method was also successful in the 2007 Australian Federal Election, where the collaboration of Sky News, Channel 7 and Auspoll provided an almost exact 53 percent two party-preferred victory to Labor over the ruling Coalition.


I cannot see how taking away perhaps the only check against election malfeasance or mistake can possibly do anything positive for our election system.

Surely you can do better.

[Ides]

Say no to polls, the last thing we need is someone bringing attention to flaws in a electoral system! Then we'd never be able to get away with vote fraud!


That would be sarcasm, by the way. Say no to some polls if you want, but say OH HELL YES to exit polls.

[LaBohemian]

This is funny. For four days prior to the "shocking" loss by Barack Obama in New Hampshire(see his new webpage at www.huffingtonpost.com) you now wage war against those same polls?

Hypocrisy, thy name is HuffingtonPost.

[NotaBeliever]

Not signing the petition. Thinking the petition is kinda dumb. Really, really. Just exactly as dumb as putting up poll results in big headlines on web sites just as soon as they come in ... especially if the results seem to point to good numbers for favorite candidates of the web site owner.

[VillyVal]

Recommending ignorance, like advocating abstinence only, does not lead to better, more intelligent results.

Decline to answer ambiguous questions. Don't participate if you just plain don't want to. But for the love of lunacy don't adopt IGNORANCE as a principled position: not in sex ed, not in religion, not in grammar.

Start a petition recommending greater literacy in reading and interpreting polls: that one I'll sign.

This petition idea is a poorly thought out suggestion, but I forgive you.

[raker]

Just say no to presidential debates that excluded Dennis Kucinich and/or Ron Paul. If Clinton or Obama had any guts they'd refuse to participate unless Kucinich is included. But then, if Democrats had any guts they wouldn't have voted for the Patriot Act.