As I sit here writing this, my co-worker is sitting beside me clicking through a link to an online poll about Sarah Palin’s experience. You can vote as many times as you want in this poll, so she clicks the link, votes, closes the window, and clicks the link again. She wants to see the 48% of people who think Sarah Palin is not qualified to be president click up to 49%.
Yesterday a friend sent this poll out to a group of people, and being argumentative sorts, we commenced to have a discussion of whether the time spent voting in this poll is worth it. As some of my friends pointed out, it could be better spent calling voters or doing other work for the campaign. After all, a poll that lets anyone vote as many times as they want is an entirely useless poll. The sample is completely self-selected, which means it is no way represents a slice of anything. This poll tells us nothing, except that so far it has been forwarded to more conservatives than liberals, or at least, conservatives have been more diligent about clicking through and voting.
It occurred to me that this is a perfect example of the weird role polls play in our political system. This poll tells us nothing about public opinion. But it feels wrong to let it stand with the current results. It holds some bizarre moral authority, because people have voted. Most polls that are presented on TV or in the newspaper have better methodological grounding than this one; but most of them are a lot less accurate than is popularly believed. Polls can be manipulated very easily by slight changes in wording or presentation. Sample sizes, and therefore accuracy, varies widely. People often mislead pollsters, intentionally or not. But the news media needs something to talk about every day, all day, so every poll is greeted with excitement or terror, as if it’s gospel truth.
Forget the polls. None of them really says anything. Go volunteer! Make a few calls from home, if that’s all you have time for. Go to a swing state for the weekend. Donate money. Ignore everything said on TV. Don’t sit there, clicking the poll over and over again. Do something.
(In my coworker’s defense, she only did this five or ten times, and by now she has moved on to real, very important, campaign work.)
EDIT: Apparently this has been quite a controversial/infamous poll, and NOW (which posted it) has an article up discussing online polling.
