Say "No" to Pollsters!: a HuffPost Call to Action
In 1996, Harry Shearer and I founded the Partnership for a Poll-Free America, a campaign urging people to hang up on the pollsters who are polluting our political environment by dominating media coverage, influencing election outcomes, and turning our political leaders into slavish followers.
We were able to get a few thousand people to take our Say No to Pollsters pledge but, at the time, the Huffington Post wasn't even a glimmer in my eye, and "going viral" was still something that required a visit to the doctor.
In the dozen years since then, the problems caused by polling have only gotten worse.
Today's political landscape is littered with media mavens who insist on treating polling results as if Moses just brought them down from the mountaintop. And reporters have become addicted to the ease of reporting the latest horse-race results as if they were actual news.
Look at the five days between Iowa and New Hampshire, when the political conversation (including here on HuffPost) was dominated by polls that turned out to be wildly inaccurate. USA Today had Obama up by 13 points just two days before he lost by three. A sixteen-point swing -- in 48 hours -- is, I trust, beyond the "margin or error." And please don't tell me it was the result of Hillary getting misty.
But even if they had been right, do we want our political debate dominated not by issues but by who is up and who is down, who is hot and who is not?
No wonder politicians have become pathological people pleasers, addicted to the short-term buzz of a bump in the polls, who can't even get dressed in the morning without consulting the latest numbers.
But we can't expect these polling junkies -- both in the media and those running for office -- to kick the habit on their own. We have to stage an intervention. And it's as easy as hanging up your phone. Response rates are already abysmally low -- often dropping below 25%. So if enough of us refuse to answer, the polling data will become so unrepresentative and unreliable even the media would have to admit it was useless.
So I'm asking you to sign our Say No to Pollsters petition.
It's fast, it's easy, and it can be very effective. In fact, if everyone who signs the petition also gets everyone they know in states with upcoming primaries to sign the petition too, it can have an immediate impact on the way the 2008 race is reported on and run.
By just saying "No" to pollsters any time they call, we can force our leaders -- and the reporters who cover them -- to start thinking for themselves again. Starting here. Starting now.
So sign the petition and Say "No" to Pollsters! And send it to everyone you know in Nevada, Michigan, South Carolina, and Florida. Remember: Friends Don't Let Friends Talk to Pollsters!
Follow Arianna Huffington on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ariannahuff
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Arianna, as opposed to depending on Diebold and Rove to count our(?) electronic votes? NO THANKS! I do thank the many pollsters for making us all wonder, and I thank Dennis Kucinich for asking for a recount, and heaps of applause for California Secretary of State Debra Bowen who went to New Hampshire to watch the count http://www
One more point about this, which is that in New Hampshire ONLY a candidate can call for a recount, NOT a citizen/voter, and then said candidate has to pay for it to boot. If the machines are hacked, pollsters could be the only ones publicly registering voter choice, and could provide the only information impelling a candidate to ask for a paper hand count.
And New Hampshire voting machines ARE hackable:
http://www
I'm sorry, but when I saw Clinton sneak in there at the 11th hour, with a scant 2-3% lead over Obama, my immediate reaction was "election fraud". Somebody cheated.
The win was simply too eerily similar to the past two presidential elections for my comfort.
To come up SO many points in SO little time? My personal concerns have less to do with polls and pundits than with the actual tallies.
To the media: don't just apologize for "getting it wrong," investigate!
I think EVERY election should be recounted from now on, until we can be convinced that the paperless Diebolds are indeed processing an accurate count. Twice bitten, 100 times shy, I guess.
I like Hillary, don't get me wrong, but if she cheated, well.... There was just something fishy with that win, and I think we all know it.
Well I learn from the pie chart that today generation is tolerate of gays today then couple of years ago...shou
Also funny that didn't the Huffington post try do some pollsting early in the summer...w
Polling is like census.
BRAVO ARIANNA
polls and pollsters serve absolutely NO purpose for the american voter - the purposes they do serve are those of the parties that PAY for them - the opportunities for corruption and bias are blatantly obvious
wouldn't it be incredible if just one of the leading candidates had the cajones to encourage their supporters not to participate in polls?
too much to ask?... probably
that would be like asking the candidates to insist on a uniform, free and fair, one man one vote, pencil and paper verifiable election process which guarantees that every vote counts and that every vote is counted...
correctly
I have a lot of respect and admiration for Arianna and Harry, but I'm going to have to disagree with this one. I happen to like polls, as I think they can be very useful. If I get the opportunity to express my opinion about a terrible administration, or promote a lesser-known candidate, I'll be happy to do so.
Okay, I'll try again. Your candidate (let's face it) takes a hit in New Hampshire, and you have a Damascus Road Convesion against polling? After showing his previous poll results with Second Coming headlines?
you could just be screwing up the survey results by doing this.
honestly, if people understood polls more, we'd have less frustration with them.
for a start, polls have never been shown to effect the outcome of an election.
most importantly, none of these journalistic sites post the complete and necessary information for polls, margin of error, etc.
they should be used for the campaigns, to help them get a good idea of how well or not their message is getting across.
if it's done well, polls and surveys have their place. and we have to stop dissing SCIENTIFIC internet surveys--this will be the wave of the future of polls. imo
This is a terrible idea. The only real protection Democracies have lies in openness and transparency. To say "yes, let's be open, except in this one instance, when we pledge not to cooperate with the press," is to try to deprive the people of the most important ingredient of their freedom at the most important moment.
Imagine how glad Putin is when Russians turn away from the press as if they are the enemy. It makes it so much easier to manipulate the process without detection.
Voters should be encouraged to change their opinions up till the moment of voting -- that is part of freedom. To the extent that people are free to make decisions, polling will never be a perfect science. But hiding information from the press cannot make the process more perfect, only more dangerous.
The cottage industries that have proliferated and prospered off the prostitution of (and demise) of our election process has really only served to denegrate and deny opportunities for Democracy to become a reality in Our country. In fact we don't need any of it. When the advent of the magnetic card strip in the early 1970's was unveiled it should have spelled the end of a Washington D.C. centralized attendance for politicians to run Our Government. It should have been heralded and promoted as the final solution to a one citizen, one accurately accountable vote system for the first time ever available in history. However, any prospect of Elitists allowing common people to craft and vote for themselves their on laws and taxmoney uses without their control mechanisms (ability to buy and sell politicians and government employees, craft their own loopholes/laws, and gain/create accessways into the U.S. Treasury)is eternally unacceptable. The Elitist Ruling Class will never let a fluid democracy become a reality. Polls are design tools and they don't serve the people's best interests for democracy.
It's futile. Most people already do not cooperate with telephone polls and still they go on and deliver pretty reliable results. This is because the the pollsters aren't just looking for any respondents who answer, but are instead trying to fill a number of demographic and geographic quotas to produce a representative sample.
If you don't cooperate, they'll just keep calling and calling other households until they get someone your age, gender, political affiliation, etc. You won't make it impossible for them, you'll only make it a little more expensive for their clients.
Besides, the biggest problem with political polls as they are currently used isn't the respondents but rather the questions. And, the polls the public never gets to see, those sponsored by the political parties and the candidates, are the worst.
Each of their polls focuses on "our" candidate's positives and the other candidates' negatives. The positives and negatives which move the "likely to vote for" meter the most are the ones used.
And so we get the pablum of "change," as well as all that nasty stuff.
If you really want to screw up the polls, respond and tell them you don't believe anything negative about any candidates. Tell them you're voting on the issues. Refusing to answer will simply let some other dunderhead who has the same demographics as you help to make the decisions.
I agree with much of what Huffington argues, and understand her frustration with the constant "horse race" stats. Perhaps she's right.
But I have serious doubts. There is some frighteningly strong evidence that Diebold machines flipped the vote in Hillary's favor in New Hampshire, and the polls are a big piece of that evidence. Polls have historically been used all around the world for many years now to detect election fraud.
Unfortunately, our media and almost everyone else have virtually ignored all the polling anamolies that have indicated election fraud in the last couple of elections, but that's a different issue.
Polling is an important method to protect elections from fraud.
When I was young the team I voted for always lost. Then I started paying attention to the
polls. After that I won almost every election
I've voted in. Now I fit in. Please don't take
the polls away.
Without polls, how would George W. Bush know what to veto.
He seems to veto everything that polls show that a majority of the people want: SCHIP and stem cell research for example.
Polls suck.
Polling that takes place during a political race is a cynical tool used to manipulate election TURNOUTS, and nothing more.
Polls, and the idiotic political bobbleheads of the media, should be ignored, if not scorned outright.
IMHO, this could (and should) prove to be an historical election cycle because for the first time in this country's history, a majority of Americans have access to all of the information we need to make AN INFORMED DECISION. ON OUR OWN.
The internet.
http://www
All you have to do is follow the money, kids.
actually, a MUCH better way to undermine the polling system would be to give false answers to about half of the questions, selected randomly. This should be a civic duty of any citizen, interested in fostering/
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