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The 2004 presidential election campaign provided a venue for a wide variety of polling, and it was not without its controversies. In the end, the final estimates of the preelection polls, the bread and butter of the polling industry, were very good at suggesting it would be a close race, with Bush the likely winner. In historical perspective, the overall performance was above average for the period since 1956. Issues raised in the media leading up to the end of the campaign and the final estimates, however, created some controversy, especially about the likely voter methodology used by different organizations. There were also some anomalies at the end of the campaign as some firms and collaborators ended up producing different estimates of the outcome depending on likely voter definitions or the mode of data collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of the studies of voter behavior have dealt with voter turnout, but few have looked at other aspects of voting behavior that could be linked to balloting method. A reasonable amount of information has now accumulated about the impact of the shift from polling place elections to voting by mail on turnout, rolloff, drop-off, differences in voting for partisan offices and referenda, and differences in straight-ticket voting. This article analyzes recent time series of voting data in Oregon to assess the impact of the shift in voting method on these issues. The analysis includes data at the state, county, precinct, and individual levels, including individual ballots. The results suggest new criteria for evaluating shifts from one voting method to another that may be applied to other electoral reforms, such as those that will result from the Help America Vote Act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines issues involving the national preelection polls in the U.S. in 2000, including the subset of tracking efforts at the end of the campaign, the state-level election polls and some aggregate data models. The 2000 election campaign saw more polls and more reporting of polls than ever before. The final outcome of the election was very close, decided by .5 percent of the popular vote. Presidential candidate Al Gore won the popular vote, but George W. Bush became the forty-third president of the U.S. when he was awarded Florida's 25 electoral votes on December 12, 2000 by a U.S. Supreme Court decision. There were 18 organizations that produced a final estimate of the outcome of the election, compared to nine in 1996 and six in 1992. This set of organizations includes those producing final estimates based on data collected as early as October 24, 2000, as well as by using information from some organizations that collected data via the Internet. According to statistical methods used to assess poll accuracy in the past, most of the pollsters did an efficient job in producing their final estimates of the election outcome. One feature that distinguished the final 2000 polls was an increase in their sample sizes compared to previous years.

Many claims are being made about the advantages of conducting surveys on the Web. However, there has been little research on the effects of format or design on the levels of unit and item response or on data quality. In a study conducted at the University of Michigan, a number of experiments were added to a survey of the student population to assess the impact of design features on resulting data quality. A sample of 1,602 students was sent an e-mail invitation to participate in a Web survey on attitudes toward affirmative action. Three experiments on design approaches were added to the survey application. One experiment varied whether respondents were reminded of their progress through the instrument. In a second experiment, one version presented several related items on one screen, while the other version presented one question per screen. In a third experiment, for one series of questions a random half of the sample clicked radio buttons to indicate their answers, while the other haft entered a numeric response in a box. This article discusses the overall implementation and outcome of the survey, and it describes the results of the imbedded design experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article relates the concern about polling in the public's interest. Polling has become ubiquitous for a variety of reasons. Probably the most important is that the cost of data collection has declined and anyone can get into the game for a marginal investment. A second important factor was a set of business and editorial decisions by news organizations that they could produce their own data rather than accept the preprinted results from major national polling firms. By exercising independent judgments about newsworthy topics, writing their own questions, deciding on their field periods and conducting their own analyses and writing them up, these organizations satisfied a long-standing institutional desire for independent fact gathering and interpretation. Eventually, these decisions carried over to the development of the networks' exit poll operations and then to the consolidation of these efforts. The proliferation of polls presents a problem for citizens who are at one and the same time generally interested in public opinion and what their fellow citizens think and yet have almost no ability to differentiate good data from bad, useful information from useless or to understand why two polls might produce seemingly different results.

The article discusses experimental results from a revised question wording that has successfully reduced the levels of overreport and improved the accuracy of self-reports of voting behavior in the U.S. Often survey measurement errors results in overreporting. Two different possible explanations of overreporting have been put forward. One considers overreporting the result of social desirability, in which case the respondents claim that they voted, when they clearly remember that they did not vote, for reasons of self-presentation. The other explanation is the result of memory failure, in which respondents are seen to forward telescope a remote voting experience when reporting that they voted in the most recent election. According to this study, overreporting results from a combined influence of these two reasons. A revised question wording, which encouraged respondents to scrutinize several possible contributions to response error limited combinations of these processes and question wordings based on them, is reported to have successfully reduced the levels of overreport and improved the accuracy of self-reports of voting behavior.

The article discusses the exit poll of 1989 Virginia gubernatorial election. In the contest, Democrat L. Douglas Wilder narrowly defeated his Republican opponent, J. Marshall Coleman, winning by two-tenths of one percentage point. Yet an experienced research firm, Mason-Dixon Opinion Research (MDOR), conducted an exit poll for several television stations in Virginia and Washington, DC, and estimated an easy Wilder victory by a 10-percentage-point margin. This 5-percentage-point discrepancy was outside the bounds of normal sampling error. The 1989 MDOR exit poll raised several interesting methodological questions and prompted a variety of speculations about what might have caused the error. The article points out that the number of interviews in the MDOR poll was not equally distributed across the 10 congressional districts, nor was registrants or actual voters. The results suggest that the estimates from the 1989 Virginia exit poll stemmed from the use of face-to-face interviews conducted in person than from a problematic sample of precincts by congressional district.

This article reports on the annual membership meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), held on My 19, 1989, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Retiring president Phil Meyer presided the meeting. President Meyer called the meeting to order. He announced that Chuck Cowan has expressed his intention to step down as Site Selection Committee chair. He introduced Karen Goldenberg, who has been selected as Associate Site Selection Committee chair by the Executive Council. Meyer reiterated the Council's interest in hearing from volunteers to serve on the committee. He then turned to various Council members for reports of their committees' activities during the past year. In reviewing budgetary matters discussed during the past year, three items were noted. A review had been undertaken of the relative costs of supplying services to foreign members: while the dues structure was not covering the full cost of all these memberships, the Council agreed to continue to provide a small net subsidy to this class of members. Second, a decision was made to invest nonworking AAPOR cash balances in conservative bond funds in order to obtain a higher rate of return than is available in checking accounts. Third, slight revisions will be made to current accounting procedures to reflect better the allocation of funds to projects that continue across multiple fiscal years, such as the allocations to cover the production and printing of the AAPOR history.

Different techniques for respondent selection can affect data quality. These differences can result in variations in the distribution of partisans in preelection surveys, which in turn can have an effect on the distribution of candidate preference. Persistence in trying to interview designated respondents in telephone households increased the number of Republicans in a 1984 sample, and therefore Reagan's margin over Mondale. Such differences in interviewing techniques might account for some of the variations in national preelection estimates of the outcome of the presidential election, and they suggest that caution be used in comparing marginals for party identification from different surveys employing different respondent selection techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do citizens' motivations shape their perceptions of poll reports? Increasingly, scholars are finding that citizens engage in motivated reasoning, whereby they discredit information that differs from their preexisting attitudes. The perceived credibility of opinion polls might be prone to similar motivational processes, as individuals could discount results suggesting that they hold minority opinions. We assess whether motivated reasoning influences the credibility of poll results and whether features of the presentation of those results might moderate and potentially counteract these motivational processes. In an online survey experiment conducted with a national sample of American adults (N = 1,211), respondents were exposed to poll reports about both gun control and abortion and were asked to rate the credibility of these polls. For each report, three aspects of presentation were randomized: the direction of the poll result (majority supports/opposes), the news source reporting the poll (FoxNews/MSNBC), and the amount of methodological detail reported (none/a lot). In line with theories of motivated reasoning, respondents who held issue positions that contradicted the results of the polls found those polls less credible. Further, this decreased credibility was particularly evident among individuals with high levels of political knowledge. Source credibility cues--such as the ideological alignment of source and respondent and the presence of a message from an unexpected source--did not moderate this relationship and were unrelated to poll credibility. However, evidence suggests that methodological disclosure could moderate the motivational biases in credibility assessments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Election administrators and public officials often consider changes in electoral laws, hoping that these changes will increase voter turnout and make the electorate more reflective of the voting-age population. The most recent of these innovations is voting-by-mail (VBM), a procedure by which ballots are sent to an address for every registered voter. Over the last 2 decades, VBM has spread across the United States, unaccompanied by much empirical evaluation of its impact on either voter turnout or the stratification of the electorate. In this study, we fill this gap in our knowledge by assessing the impact of VBM in one state, Oregon. We carry out this assessment at the individual level, using data over a range of elections. We argue that VBM does increase voter turnout in the long run, primarily by making it easier for current voters to continue to participate, rather than by mobilizing nonvoters into the electorate. These effects, however, are not uniform across all groups in the electorate. Although VBM in Oregon does not exert any influence on the partisan composition of the electorate, VBM increases, rather than diminishes, the resource stratification of the electorate. Contrary to the expectations of many reformers, VBM advantages the resource-rich by keeping them in the electorate, and VBM does little to change the behavior of the resource-poor. In short, VBM increases turnout, but it does so without making the electorate more descriptively representative of the voting-age population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The arrival of electronic voting has generated considerable controversy, mostly about its vulnerability to fraud. By comparison, virtually no attention has been given to its usability, i.e., voters’ ability to vote as they intend, which was central to the controversy surrounding the 2000 US presidential election. Yet it is hard to imagine a domain of human–computer interaction where usability has more impact on how democracy works. This article reports a laboratory investigation of the usability of six electronic voting systems chosen to represent the features of systems in current use and potentially in future use. The primary question was whether e-voting systems are sufficiently hard to use that voting accuracy and satisfaction are compromised. We observed that voters often seemed quite lost taking far more than the required number of actions to cast individual votes, especially when they ultimately voted inaccurately. Their satisfaction went down as their effort went up. And accuracy with some systems was disturbingly low. While many of these problems are easy to fix, manufacturers will need to adopt usability engineering practices that have vastly improved user interfaces throughout the software industry. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

With the recent troubles in U.S. elections, there has been a nationwide push to update voting systems. States and localities are investing heavily in electronic voting systems, many of which use a touch screen. These systems offer the promise of faster and more accurate voting; however, the current reality is that they have some shortcomings in terms of voter usability. This study examines issues related to the usability of electronic voting systems and reports on a series of usability studies that involved expert review, close observation, a field test, and an exit poll to learn voters' responses to a new voting system. Our analysis shows these systems work well; however, they have some shortcomings including some that have raised concerns among a minority of voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]