Poll Finds Pollsters May Have Trouble Polling Mobile-Only Crowd

from the must-be-election-season dept

Tue, May 16th 2006 5:48pm — Mike Masnick

How do you know election season is approaching? Perhaps because stories that we haven't seen in about two years are starting to show up again. During the run up to the 2004 Presidential election, there were countless stories talking about how young folks today are increasingly dropping the landline and going mobile phone only. The political angle was that phone pollsters only call landlines -- and thus could be undercounting the youth demographic, who are more likely to just use mobile phones. Of course, that turned out to not have much of an impact (other than making Jimmy Breslin's final column look pretty silly). However, now that we're getting closer to the mid-term elections, suddenly everyone's wondering about the impact of those crazy youngsters with no land lines. So, how did the Associated Press find out about those mobile-only voters? You guessed it: they took a poll -- which, of course, would suggest that perhaps it really isn't that difficult for pollsters to reach mobile-only people if they just have the right connections. However, it is true that traditional landline only polling may eventually run into issues with missing out on a certain segment of the population, but it seems likely that some sort of workaround will be arranged to fill in the gaps without too much trouble.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

8 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

Derek Kerton (profile), 16 May 2006 @ 5:47pm

Absentee
Hmmm...Don't the young hipsters have to turn up and vote before this is even an issue. The impact of not polling youth is a lot like the impact of not polling women before suffrage. Admittedly, sad in both cases.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Tony, 16 May 2006 @ 6:52pm

Why is this a problem?
Random digit dialing is not impeded in any way.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Anonymous Coward, 16 May 2006 @ 9:35pm
  
  Re: Why is this a problem? =Laws
  1) I believe there are legal restrictions on calling cell phones that do not exist for landlines
  
  2) white pages are available for landlines but not cells
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Anonymous Coward, 16 May 2006 @ 9:38pm

when those idiots called my landline they only made me want to vote against the people they were calling for. uhh, really, disturb me at home with the same spoon fed lies and rethoric that you get from mass media, and expect me to vote for you? uhh, no.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
George, 16 May 2006 @ 11:55pm

American Idol
Why do they need to poll the voter? What are they good for except parties wasting money and news agencies telling who they think is going to win.
If they want to know how the youth is going to vote, why don't they just have political idol. More people vote for their favorite singer then they do their politician.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Miguel, 17 May 2006 @ 1:50am

Re: Why is this a problem?
The problem is that dialing numbers at random is a pretty expensive way to conduct a poll. You want to get/buy lists with demographic data so you can create a distributed sample for accuracy. Cell phone-only users don't tend to be on those lists.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Robert, 17 May 2006 @ 10:05am

Polls
The political parties buy the voter rolls from the government (legal) and try to cross ref with the "phone company" records to get the numbers - obviously missing the VoIP users (something this story did NOT address but will affect at least MY household this year) and the cell phone users.

The parties don't usually call in the guise of a "survey." They usually make calls on the day of the vote based on voter turnout in precints that normally carry their party. If the vote count is DOWN in those areas, the voters get calls.

That's how the "poll watchers" and the "callers" are linked together - just basic stuff.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Walter Dnes, 17 May 2006 @ 6:43pm

What about people with answering machines?
I've been able to avoid surveys and sales calls for several years, thanks to my answering machine. If I recognize a voice leaving a message, I'll pick up the phone and answer them. Otherwise, forget it. So much for telemarketing jerks.

As far as I'm concerned, *ANYBODY* who makes a living from cold calls to people who haven't asked for info, is a telemarketing jerk.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]