Many people say no to pollsters. They are used to refusal. For years I've used a different technique. It stops them in their tracks and they have no ready response. I simply say," Of course,what do you pay." When they protest, again quite simply, I say, "Are you being paid at the moment? Why do you assume that your time is more valuable than mine?"

Please make it clear you are not dissing exit polls. We need checks on electronic voting machines. Wasn't there another electronic foul-up in Mich. yesterday?

Ironically, your article about boycotting polls is bordered by Google ads which ask us to take polls. I don't mind a good poll once in a while, but the media obsession with polls can be likened to stepping on the scales every five minutes to see if you've lost weight. We should have 90% investigative analysis of the candidates postion on issues and 10% chitchat on polls and projections ... but I'm an idealist.

Why should we believe polls any more than the results of electronic voting? Why should we base our answers to polls based on things like poll results themselves or the canned platitudes of candidates? Like Change & Hope, etc? I want to know how they're going change life in America, how are they going to pay for it, and how soon will the posse arrive.

Really, I have great admiration for, and support John Edwards but even though he's unpolluted by PAC money, the congress he'll need to have cooperate with him is poisoned. And they will have corporate and industrial interests in their states to consider when it comes to ending the strangle-hold corporate interests have on our democracy.

Polling is a huge industry. The concept itself once had merit, But like most other aspects of life in the new millennia, it's been corrupted...just one more thing to sell.

I don't take polls because the questions are invariably loaded, leading and biased. And the irony of the above sign-up sheet being a sort of poll itself has not escaped me. Now if it were in some way a legal do-not-poll list...I'd like that!

But pollsters are getting richer and will keep on asking as long as someone has an opinion...and let's face it most folks never had an opinion they didn't share. We love to tell people about our thought process, choices, and ideas, whether it's our own or that of the last person who gave us THEIR opinion. (We all know people like that!)

And that's my opinion.

The petition is a symbolic gesture at best. Polls (much like blogs) are just "media moments" that make us feel like our opinions count -- and most of us have egos that are too big to resist these opportunities. Wouldn't our energies be better spent on demanding accountability from pollsters?

Zogby has always slanted things in Bush's way, to the point that Brian Lamb of CSpan got a mancrush on him and made him part of their crew.

People see through your ways, even if you ask them a question in a slanted way to try and boost your own interests, they'll still vote in a way that a slanted question cannot shape its reply.

Exit polls do indeed have their place.

What voters should do is start using cell phones to record by camera the efforts of ratfockers to try and mislead voters.

Get the pictures of people giving wrong direction or blocking honest efforts to vote.

Get the pictures and words of the people asking questions, or those campaigning too close to voting locations.

We will connect the dots.

i appreciate the sentiment but it won't work unless everyone - the entire population said no.
what WOULD work is if a significant segment of the population agreed to lie. this would be very difficult and VERY expensive to expedite as it would require millions of people to co-operate, etc. etc. sorry, it won't work.

Exit polls are not perfect, but much better than those taken over a phone. Remember those in Florida that had Kerry ahead by a wide margin. It didn't mean a thing if the voting machines were rigged. That is the real problem with voting results. If the machines were not rigged, the polls would have more meaning. Better yet, lets go back to a ballot we filled out with a black marking pen and hand counted by people from all parties. Not perfect, but better than the machines.

Here we are again, thinking that we need to circumvent the real problem. The problem, controlling the media not taking the Poll. I believe that there should be federal guidelines covering intentionally trying to influence an election. I believe the exit Polls are OK, and I also believe that our constitution gives us the right to control the media in this case to insure a fare election process.

eldon

Arianna;

And what makes you think that they just won't continue to "make up" results as they have in the past?????

Did anyone every consider the fact that perhaps the pollsters in NH were correct? There was some very suspicious results in the communities that used electronic voting machines that appear to indicate the votes were "flipped" in favor of Clinton. This is exactly the hack that Diebold machines were proven to be vulnerable to. Until those issues are resolved in a recount then all calls to do away with pollsters are premature. Pollsters may be the ONLY defense we have when determining if there was an anomalous outcome in an election.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiiaBqwqkXs

I disagree as well, especially if the people who start to refuse skew the demographics. If the so-called "liberal" side of an issue/candidate start to be undercounted, then the polls will likely start to show a conservative tilt. And the candidates will follow. This effort *will not* change the amount of polling that is done. The media is only half to blame. The general population *wants* to hear the racetrack numbers.

And I don't recall us refusing to tout Bush's low approval ratings in order to try to drive policy. Those are polls too.

Dear A: Don't need a pledge. Haven't been answering pollsters for many many years. Not so much because they are usually fatuous at least and often rigged, though that enters it, but because it is my time, not theirs.

Can't believe this is such a difficult idea it requires coordination. Am astonished that anyone would take these bozos seriously enough to answer them or believe them in the first place.

The Practical Vegetarian's comments near the beginning (?) raise an important point.

Many telephone polls these days are not about finding out what the public thinks, but about shaping what the public thinks. These "push polls" are outright smear campaigns conducted by political dirty tricksters, and usually are untraceable in origin. Via carefully worded questions, they spread half-truths and outright lies.

Here's the type of "question" asked, and we'll use Barak Obama for no other reason that he seems to be a a popular current push-poll target:

"Would you vote for a presidential candidate with an Islamic background, who contributed a large amount of money to an Islamic religious group calling for a holy war against the United States?"

Of course, the whole thing is about the innuendo contained in the "question". Never mind that there is NO candidate fitting that description; facts are as unimportant as the answers of those "polled". It's about the smear.

Perhaps something should be done about THOSE polls.

As far as the others, I think maybe the true polls themselves are fine, and certainly useful for candidates and parties, it's publicizing the results that has an echo-chamber distortion effect on the voting public.

The pollsters will continue to poll until they get an answer. I've done political polling. I remember seeing the person next to me in the phone bank making up answers so as to complete the polling sheets. Whne I'm polled I routinely make up outlandish answers so as to itroduce outrider data. For yeas I've been telling my marketing students and my statistics students to just make up answers when polled.

However, the worst evil associated with polling is not that it happens, but how the results are used. Suffice to say, none of the chattering heads in the media understand the error sttement or the impact of undecideds. In New Hampshire, it was the large undecideds that caused the discrepency.

Likewise for output polling. Many years ago I was polled after leaving a polling booth (in Cambridge, MA). I was asked what were the important issues that influenced my vote. I said the National Debt. The pollster kept thinking I was sayint the deficit. In addition, the pollster thought the deficit reset to zero at the start of every year.

Finally, polling is a subtle way to force undecideds toward a position. My son in New Hamsphire said they received 10 calls on the Monday befroe the vote, asking them if they had made a decision.

It's all just B##l s#*t.