Jacqueline Marcus: Tracking the National Election Polls: The Biggest Deception Played on Americans

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by Jacqueline Marcus

During election years, polls not only present voting percentages, but also they can be media tools of persuasion, depending on how voting polls are skewed. If you're baffled by recent polls that put the two candidates at an even 44% or by polls that put McCain ahead of Obama by 4 points, you may be equally baffled by the number of people who are asked to participate in the voting poll inquiries.

A mere 1,000 people represent the entire voting population in the United States. This is easy enough to discover by checking the footnotes at the bottom of most polls. For instance, this latest CNN/Time poll:

"The CNN/Time poll of 1,022 Americans was taken by Opinion Research Corporation and had a margin of error of 3 percentage points. The Hotline/Diageo poll of 924 voters had a margin of error of 3.2 percentage points." {Reuters; "McCain, Obama All Tied Up"; A CNN/Time poll showed the race deadlocked at 48 percent, and a Hotline/Diageo poll put the two candidates even at 44 percent.}

Are we to believe that 1,022 people represent the entire country of millions and millions of registered voters?!

Question: Where were these polls taken? Were they taken in Republican sectors in the South? Were phone calls made in the Midwestern states or Northeastern states? We don't know because the corporate-pollsters don't provide that information.

By analogy, suppose you were at a football stadium that holds approximately 125,000 people. You ask one person: "Name the team you're voting for." The person says, "Team X". You then send out a report to all the news and cable companies that Team X is the favorite winner based on your poll. And then you produce all sorts of colorful graphs that render the one vote into a national general percentage of voters.

This is precisely why mainstream polls are the biggest deception played on American voters on record. Furthermore, there is a huge contradiction between the polls and the rising numbers of Democratic registered voters: "An estimated 3.5 million new voters have been added to the national voter rolls. As the AP reported this week, 'these figures are up for blacks, women and young people. Rural and city. South and North.' In 17 of the first 24 primaries, voter turnout was the largest in four decades. {Associated Press, 5/5/08; USA Today, 2/29/08}"

At the same time, according to UPI: "The number of registered Republican voters in the United States fell as registered Democrats rose since the last general election, voting experts said. But, almost as often, people are registering to vote without declaring any party affiliation, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

While implications for the general election remain unclear, experts told the Times voting registration numbers may signal a movement away from the GOP that could affect local, state, and national politics for several election cycles.

In battleground states such as Iowa and Nevada, state officials reported more registered Democrats than Republicans, a reversal from 2004. No state officials reported a similar switch to more registered Republicans than Democrats for the same period." {UPI; "Report: Number Of Registered Republicans Falls" August 5, 2008}.

Perhaps the truth lies somewhere within these numbers:

The Polls Are "Dead Even" when you...

1) Subtract the millions of Black votes
2) Subtract the millions of Latino votes
3) Subtract the millions of new Youth votes
4) Subtract the millions of Gay votes
5) Subtract all the Democratic/Liberal votes

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION

Bookmark/Search this post with:

buzzflash | delicious | digg | yahoo | technorati