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The polls messed up

• 6456457 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification
• laufj 6y ago
  I'm much more inclined to believe there was some funny business going on with the Trump votes.
  • tghw 6y ago
    That's an extraordinary claim. You need extraordinary evidence to back it up. So far, we haven't seen anything to suggest that evidence exists.
    • p1necone 6y ago
      Trump is already trying to sue close states to stop them from counting votes, so there's evidence that there is some meddling going on. But you're right - evidence is needed of messing with the actual votes, as opposed to just trying to interrupt the counting. Edit: I'm saying the lawsuit is the meddling, not that there is meddling going on as part of the count.
      • totalZero 6y ago
        A lawsuit isn't evidence of anything. Trump especially is a litigious person. Lawsuits are his hammer and every problem is a nail.
        • p1necone 6y ago
          Seems like I was unclear - I'm saying that Trumps lawsuit is frivolous, and is evidence that he is meddling in the election, not that there is actually something suspect being done by the counters.
      • deleted 6y ago
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    • deleted 6y ago
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    • wildassguess 6y ago
      Botnets that were active in the months leading up to the election but that suddenly shut down. Anyone looking at that? If Trump or Biden had outside (foreign) help from anywhere it is likely , given the porous nature of our election security that some of the external structures needed to make it work have been dismantled since they are no longer useful. Maybe security researchers could look at known botnets or intrusions for clues to whether compromised networks aided anyone.
    • AlisdairO 6y ago
      In fairness, there's already clear evidence of attempts to subvert the election via manipulation of the USPS. It's not really an 'extraordinary' claim to suggest that Trump might attempt to manipulate the vote via other means - although I do agree that evidence is required to make the assertion.
      • TMWNN 6y ago
        >In fairness, there's already clear evidence of attempts to subvert the election via manipulation of the USPS. Yet you fail to provide said clear evidence. There were a lot of nonsense allegations made which conflated delays in USPS parcel processing (volume skyrocketing because of COVID19) and flats processing (volume dropping for same reason, and COVID19-related absences), and related logistics adjustment (removing flats processing machines), and normal attrition/adjustment in USPS drop box locations, with "Trump is trying to stop the vote!" I wrote more about this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24290622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24290622 .
        • AlisdairO 6y ago
          The president himself has admitted that he wishes to starve the USPS to limit widespread mail in voting: https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-admits-he-wants-block-usps-funding-sabotage-mail-voting-2020-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-admits-he-wants-block-... . This in a pandemic where vote by mail is something any sane government should be supporting enthusiastically. Potentially relatedly, right now there's 300,000 ballots missing/delayed: https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2020/1103/USPS-won-t-comply-with-order-to-sweep-for-300-000-delayed-ballots https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2020/1103/USPS-won-t-... .
  • Retric 6y ago
    That’s likely conformation bias. I suspect 3 major factors are at play. Voting by mail is higher risk as bad ballots don’t get resubmitted and it depends on the postal system to get it in on time. Republican get out the vote message could mobilize people that thought they where behind while Democrats thought they had a comfortable lead. That’s always dangerous. COVID was outside the existing models and prompted unusual behavior by both voters and how states ran things. Even with all of that, this election is well within projections. Biden seems to have a strong lead in the popular vote and a weak one in the electoral college. Florida and Georgia look unexpected, but not wildly so.
• jmcgough 6y ago
  It's a bit early to do a post-mortem when there's still millions of votes to count.
  • nine_k 6y ago
    Isn't it the result of messing up? In a perfectly organized system (rarely found in reality) the counting would have finished within 2-3 hours after the end of voting.
    • jmcgough 6y ago
      Republican state senators in multiple states (PA, MI, WI) blocked plans to prepare or precount mailed ballots. This is working as intended.
    • CameronNemo 6y ago
      Where did you get that 2-3 hrs number? Do other nation states declare election results that quickly?
      • bleepblorp 6y ago
        Yes, most other democratic countries do. American-style slow results have more in common with the kinds of places that need time to "massage" the results than with the electoral processes in most democracies.
        • rtx 6y ago
          Looking from outside it's an horror show. No voter ID, no physical marks on person all ready voted. Most bizzare is the mail ballot how do you even trust those.
          • Fezzik 6y ago
            The mail in ballot is probably the most secure element of the whole voting system. So long as your address is up-to-date with the Dept. of Motor Vehicles you are sent a barcoded/secure ballot and return envelope. Multiple states have been doing this for decades with effectively zero fraud. The few errors have been from people not updating their addresses or people filing out absentee ballots sent to old addresses, which is an entire different issue. Or there was one guy in Oregon that underwent a kidney transplant around election time, moved, and accidentally voted twice because he received two ballots. He did not even remember doing so he was so haggard. The only real impediment/threat to voting is the Republican party doing any and everything they can to limit peoples’ ability to vote.
• koboll 6y ago
  This was an especially tough race to forecast because turnout surged to levels not seen in a century, which included lots of new voters. Polls tend to focus on "likely voters", which is defined mostly by who's voted before. So something like the massive surge we saw in Latino Trump voters in Florida and Texas would be difficult to see coming unless you have some reliable way of forecasting which seemingly-unlikely-voters will actually turn out this time around, which is extremely difficult -- people tend to be much more likely to say they'll vote than to actually vote, so simply asking them isn't reliable. "Shy Trump voters" probably isn't the core problem in an unusually high-turnout election. The problem is that there's no real way of predicting who pollsters should be interviewing.
  • lostcolony 6y ago
    "The problem is that there's no real way of predicting who pollsters should be interviewing. That isn't a problem. That's why random sampling and confidence intervals exist. "Polls tend to focus on 'likely voters'" - no they don't. They randomly sample, and then ask people whether they plan to vote or not; they still get, and report, the numbers amongst registered voters, vs likely (as defined however) voters.
    • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      They sample as randomly as they can, but that's not very random, because a non-random subset of the people they call don't want to talk to them. If you've ever seen a polling organization discuss "weighting", this problem is what they're talking about - they have to adjust the raw poll results based on their estimates of how response rates were biased, or they'll get answers that they know are wrong.
      • lostcolony 6y ago
        Which is a different problem than "who pollsters should be interviewing", which is what I was responding to.
• bo1024 6y ago
  This is not precise enough and I don't agree. > when the vast majority of polls in Florida showed Biden in the lead, and then Biden lost there by a few percentage points, that’s a polling error. The job of the polls is to gather information, not forecast. It sounds like forecasters are setting up to pass blame off onto the polls instead of taking responsibility. And I guess they got away with this in 2016. The polls asked people questions, the people answered, the polls reported the answers. So one would have to dig a lot deeper into the poll's claims to say they messed up.
  • fiblye 6y ago
    Poll percentages aren’t raw data. Usually there are various weights and balances applied to the counts, and these could give misleading numbers. E.g., polls might think male latinos who finished college might turn up at the polls at a lower proportion than they actually did, which can result in significant shifts. There’s also the factor of questioning, both how things are worded and the means they use to ask them. Landline polling with 50 questions (yes, some pollers do this and you can see the questions they ask) aren’t likely to reach people with jobs or people who are young, so that results in the few people they do reach giving undue weight to “make up” for the voters they couldn’t poll. Wording of a question can also change how a person reports their result, and there’s always the lizard man constant and people who intentionally screw with pollers, some being easy to detect and discard. In a way, they do end up as forecasters.
    • bo1024 6y ago
      Yes, I agree with all these things. I still think there needs to be a lot more precision and details about what the polls claim to do, to say they screwed up.
  • Dylan16807 6y ago
    Most people have made up their mind ahead of time. An accurate information-gathering poll for an election should usually serve as an accurate forecast for that election.
    • 6y ago
• ineedasername 6y ago
  In 2016 the polls were arguably "correct" in that, though they incorrectly predicted a Clinton win, the results were still mostly within the margin of error, i.e., the polls weren't really predicting one candidate or another because Clinton's lead was too small to be statistically significant. This time, we might end up in the counter-intuitive territory where the poll were "wrong" even if they pointed in the direction of the winner, because the results are outside the margin of error.
  • AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    > In 2016 the polls were arguably "correct" in that, though they incorrectly predicted a Clinton win, the results were still mostly within the margin of error, i.e., the polls weren't really predicting one candidate or another because Clinton's lead was too small to be statistically significant. The problem is that Presidential elections are always pretty close. It has been almost a half century since any candidate has gotten more than 60% of the popular vote. If the result is always within the margin of error, how useful does that make the polls?
    • Swizec 6y ago
      > If the result is always within the margin of error, how useful does that make the polls? From the perspective of ad clicks and news readership, very.
    • Karrot_Kream 6y ago
      > If the result is always within the margin of error, how useful does that make the polls? That's what Gelman's post is about. There's something wrong with polling methodology and statisticians' models, and it's time to see what.
      • dragonwriter 6y ago
        > That's what Gelman's post is about. There's something wrong with polling methodology and statisticians' models, and it's time to see what. The problem is that it's very hard without more data than can be gathered, and it may be a moving target. This same fact (or, rather, highly likely conclusion of substantial, correlated polling error indicating a systemic error) was, remember, widely observed in the wake of 2016 and the common hypothesis (for which fixes were implemented in 2020) was that the problem was pollsters not weighting samples for education.
• strangattractor 6y ago
  Trump voters are understandably embarrassed to admit they will vote for him. Who wants to admit even anonymously that they will support such a sociopath.
  • hoka-one-one 6y ago
    Thanks for the post
  • steve76 6y ago
    I'll admit it. I voted for Trump. Why? Here's what happens when you live under real Democrat policies. Gunfights. Knife fights. Fist fights. Not far away. Right outside your front door. All crimes of opportunity. Meaning if they see you, you get it. Prison is safer. I'm here because they came after my family. 5H. Investigations. They are not fair. They are not your friend. Wealth soon will protect you as much as a prison commissary account will. And I'm the psycho, huh. Concerning the article, let's recap what his political opposition did to win, mostly international corporations loyal to no one but themselves: Corrupted the FBI Partisan impeachment Collaborated with Communists to unleash a biological attack Committed hundreds of nationwide riots and arsons Mail in bailout scam, and keep counting the vote And wow. Big surprise. They juiced the polls to help with messaging. Must be life and death for them. Glad I can do the math. No more smiling celebrity to hide behind anymore. Now they just have bullying. You break it you bought it.
• shahbaby 6y ago
  If people lie, you can't poll accurately. And when people view an election as a game to "win", why not lie to throw off the other side? It's a basic art of war tactic.
  • droptablemain 6y ago
    So you're implying there's a mass conspiracy among Trump supporters to lie to pollsters?
    • vermilingua 6y ago
      Why does it need to be a conspiracy? There is massive (at least percieved) social pressure against Trump supporters, how could this possibly not make it difficult to poll accurately?
    • compiler-guy 6y ago
      It doesn’t need to be a conspiracy, just a general tendency that corresponds with political affiliation.
    • possibleworlds 6y ago
      They sure talk about it a lot on places like reddit. Justification being a belief that it is not truly anonymous, and the info will be used against them down the track in various ways.
      • koheripbal 6y ago
        This is the first I've heard of it, and I'm on conservative subs all day every day.
    • bleepblorp 6y ago
      There are two possible explanations for why US polling stopped tracking US election results in 2004 and now underestimates conservative vote margins. Either conservatives have started lying to pollsters about their voting intentions or conservative officials started manipulating the vote totals in their favor. Take your pick as to which possible explanation is most palatable and/or most probable.
• saeranv 6y ago
  For context, this blog post is by Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University, and one of the people developing the presidential forecast model for The Economist. So he's not a pollster, but he's relying heavily on poll data for making predictions, which is why his particular focus in this post is not just about the ways the polls were off, but how the polls were incorporated into The Economist prediction model. I would argue 538 made a similar error[1], but unlike Gelman, Nate Silver is a less likely to admit their model was off, and consequently examine/discuss the underlying factors that lead to this issue. [1] I don't know if error is the right term here, but basically the fact that the actual election results seem to be landing near the lower end of the predicted 95% intervals for both the 538 and the Economist models.
  • ehsankia 6y ago
    Well for one, 538 gave Trump 10% at the lowest, which is quite a bit better than 4% by CU. Also, putting Florida aside, everything else so far has been well within the error margin, even if the overall mean is 3-4 points shifted towards Trump. I'm not an expert, but that's the whole point of confidence intervals. Polls will never be accurate, but it's about using the right uncertainty, and also mixing uncertainties properly. EDIT: Let's look at a few of the tipping point results from 538 [1] Florida: 50.9/48.4 -> 47.8/51.2 (2.8 diff) [99% reporting] Arizona: 50.7/48.1 -> 50.7/47.9 (0.1 diff) [86% reporting] Texas: 48.8/50.3 -> 46.4/52.2 (1.9 diff) [85% reporting] Georgia: 50.1/49.2 -> 49.1/49.7 (0.7 diff) [98% reporting] Minnesota: 53.7/44.6 -> 52.6/45.4 (0.9 diff) [99% reporting] It's also worth noting that a lot of these are still at 85-95 percent reporting, so it's not over, but yes I don't see anything that's very off, even Florida that was so off was only 3 points off. I do consider 3 points to be well within the toss-up category. [1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/ https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/ EDIT2: I think the main thing that surprised people is how in some places, mail-in votes came first, whereas in some other places, mail-in votes are coming much later. This really skews the early data but as things settle, everything is coming much closer to the predictions. But this is something 538 and others have been warning about since May or earlier.
    • 6y ago
• jcomis 6y ago
  The fact is even in an anonymous poll many people simply won't say they are voting for Trump.
  • ineedasername 6y ago
    But you'd expect to see a difference between stated support of Trump between regular polls and anonymous polls, where Trump supporters might be a little less "shy", but according to Fivethirtyeight that's not the case. I think something more complicated is going on, possibly sampling error rather than (only) shy supporters.
  • WhompingWindows 6y ago
    Where is your evidence for this? The election itself IS an anonymous poll of the population, and clearly many millions are voting for Trump. There is no shyness about them.
    • cbozeman 6y ago
      Every sexual study that sociologists have conducted, ever. Lying, even when you're completely anonymous, is a serious problem in social sciences, and one for which sociologists have had to correct for.
• vmception 6y ago
  I've been standing on a paddleboard in calm waters, surrounded by people to my left and right that are convincing me of a wave coming on their side and don't know the people on the other side of me believe the same thing. It's not surprising that technologists from the same schools and cities all failed to understand this again. The filter bubble affects us all, including you, including me, including the people you think are completely brainwashed. I just happen to VPN with new browser sessions a lot and get to see it. I also don't block people with different ideologies lol so there's that.
  • saeranv 6y ago
    This is why I think having a ground game is absolutely critical for winning elections - it provides this feedback loop to campaign officials to be able to modify their strategy based on what actual voters are thinking about. I've knocked on doors, and worked phones for various campaigns, and you learn a lot. The most important thing you learn, is that voters, and especially undecided voters are extremely ignorant (they are undecided for a reason) and are extremely susceptible to believe misinformation, or rumors. If you're not out there talking and debating with them, no one's going to knock them out of their bubble. The Biden's campaign decision to not knock on doors, talk to voters, and get them registered just seems like a disastrous error to me. And yes, I know there's a pandemic going on, but there are safe ways to talk to people in person.
    • vmception 6y ago
      In some demographics they did that. They just fail to address what people actually care about, it is a chronic party-wide problem. The parties never address or even acknowledge the criticisms about them. Choosing to instead imagine that everyone that doesn't believe what they do, already, actually believe the opposite. When people really just weigh different things and factor different things in, and aren't consciously thinking about whatever another person considers a trigger. Critical error. Blocking half of the people in the country and then being surprised that half the country didn't believe the same thing you did is not a productive use of energy.
• kumarvvr 6y ago
  One reason most polls were off in 2016, and now (polls in states that are competitive), could be attributed to "shy" voters. While most people will proudly claim they want to vote one way or the other, a good percentage of the population, doesn't want to say 'I Vote Trump', because they are afraid that their voting choice will not be socially acceptable in their circles.
  • thrav 6y ago
    For anyone interested, there’s a thorough politico interview with some California researchers pioneering exploration into this topic.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • jmcgough 6y ago
    538 did a good article about this: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-supporters-arent-shy-but-polls-could-still-be-missing-some-of-them/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-supporters-arent-... The tl;dr is that there's more evidence against it than for it. Polling errors are typically caused by unrepresentative polling - southern latino voters (one of the key shifts for Trump in Florida) in particular are hard to reach for polls, because there can be a language barrier.
  • finder83 6y ago
    Anecdotally, I would actually attribute it more to lying than shyness, though I've heard and seen examples of both. For myself, I dislike pollsters and mainstream media, so I will say that my vote is not information I share. For my friends and family, they'll blatantly lie in an (probably vein) attempt to throw off the numbers. There is a huge distrust of media in the US, and pollsters are seen as part of that. I do think there is some component to bias influencing the election and how polls can be either manipulated or withheld to manipulate that. Personally, I think we'd be better off politically without pollsters and less polarized without the media complex.
  • neaanopri 6y ago
    None of the Trump voters I've encountered can even be remotely described as shy
• yk 6y ago
  > ... we can’t be so happy about having issued that 96% win probability. Our model messed up. As it stands now, that sounds pretty good, however we have to wait for the end of the count of course. And in general, I am a fan of not overly editorializing mathematical output. Nate Silver made on his podcast today the point that the popular vote polls look quite good right now, because mail ballots in very blue states like NY are still be counted. However, I kinda enjoy how the forecasters are beating themselves up right now, even if I think that is probably somewhat premature right now.
• 0xy 6y ago
  How is Nate Silver not utterly discredited after yet another disaster? He repeatedly claimed the polls were not like 2016 and made some utterly useless predictions as a result. His entire job is poll analysis and he fails to see how they're fundamentally flawed when some of them were off by more than double the margin of error. Why is he still relevant?
• paledot 6y ago
  The polls didn't mess up, the election did. Gerrymandering and vote suppression has been eating at the heart of American democracy for decades. Your survey of "likely voters" now needs to take into account the probability that a respondent will show up to a polling station to find broken voting machines, that their ID is no longer acceptable, or that their mail-in ballot will be "lost" in the postal system.
  • 341341 6y ago
    > Gerrymandering What does this have to do with a Presidential election? > vote suppression Dead people, illegal immigrants and other non-citizens, and people who've already voted shouldn't be able to vote. That the left opposes reasonable measures to prevent this, like voter ID laws, demonstrates clearly that they disagree. And this "count every vote" mantra, even if restricted to the votes of citizens (meeting age, residency, and registration requirements), is still absurd. In my state, they print ballots in a half dozen different languages. I flatly disagree that someone who can't read and write English (especially the basic English used in election materials) should be voting. Our laws are written in English. Likewise, if you're too lazy to make the effort to vote and require a fraud-prone mail-in ballot, or if you're so cognitively impaired that you can't follow basic instructions and your ballot requires interpretation to divine intent, your vote shouldn't count.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • aent 6y ago
    Wasn't there a record turnout?
    • woodruffw 6y ago
      Turnout numbers are a proxy for political passion, not the absence or presence of suppression. It could just as easily be said that this year's record turnout would have been higher, were it not for the presence of efforts nakedly aimed at suppressing the vote.
  • cambalache 6y ago
• jussij 6y ago
  > But when the vast majority of polls in Florida showed Biden in the lead, and then Biden lost there by a few percentage points, that’s a polling error. What went wrong in Florida shows up clearly in the results for Miami-Dade county. The Biden vote in that county was way down on the results acheived by Hillary Clinton and that then meant Florida was lost. And in my opinion this shows exactly why polls can go wrong. In the last days of campaigning Trump ran hard on the idea Biden was a communists, hell bent on turning America into the next Cuba. That theme resonated strongly with the Cuban-American population of Florida. I suspect in the early days of polling that Trump fear campaigning was just simmering away, having little effect. But it really came to the boil on election day.
• pmoriarty 6y ago
  People are surprised by how "wrong" the pollsters are, but hackable voting/vote-counting machines could account for the discrepancies in this and previous elections, both in the US and abroad. Until machines are taken out of the equation, I find it difficult to consider any election legitimate. The general public could swallow this because they're completely clueless about computer security, but I'm surprised HN readers would be so trusting of these machines when there's been expose after expose (many of them landing on HN's front page) about how vulnerable they are.
  • nathanaldensr 6y ago
    I don't think they are trusting, in general, but things are easier to overlook or rationalize when the results go in one's favored direction.
  • GhostVII 6y ago
    Has there ever been any evidence that vote counting machines in the US have been hacked? I don't like electronic voting either, but I think it's pretty extreme to delegitimize every election over something we haven't actually seen happen. Only 8 states use electronic voting anyways.
• baby 6y ago
  Weren’t the polls right last elections and this election again? Blue won the popular vote twice. In any democracy the elections would be over by now, Biden won the popular vote, that’s it. But in the US...
  • refurb 6y ago
    No, the polls were horrible last election and this election. Just randomly picking an example, the polls were of by almost +10% for Trump in Florida. And “any democracy”? Is Canada not a democracy either? We don’t elect our leader based on popular vote either.
  • lopmotr 6y ago
    Blue won the popular vote in all 7 previous elections. It's not very useful or difficult to predict that. If you don't like the electoral college system, go look at what it was negotiated for and also stop wanting whatever that was too. Otherwise you're just like someone saying "That other country should be part of my country! Not fair!" In New Zealand's last election, the National Party won the popular vote but their opponent the Labour Party actually won the election and is now in power. So New Zealand isn't a democracy either?
    • abraae 6y ago
      > In New Zealand's last election, the National Party won the popular vote but their opponent the Labour Party actually won the election and is now in power. Incorrect. In the last election, a couple of weeks ago, Labour easily won the popular vote and is also in power.
  • nathanaldensr 6y ago
    The United States is a representative republic, not a democracy. Yes, I am aware of the nuances of each. The Constitution clearly outlines how voting should proceed, the Electoral College, etc. It would take Constitutional amendments to change this system, the same as any other part of the Constitution. There is no "popular vote" for the President, legally speaking. The popular vote is essentially a colloquial totaling of 51 separate vote-totaling processes.
• rhhjhhgfd 6y ago
  The models didn’t take voter suppression by the Republicans into account.
• austincheney 6y ago
  What is actual practical harm if the polls fail to accurately predict an election?
  • triceratops 6y ago
    Politicians have no idea what to campaign on, or what their constituents want.
  • NineStarPoint 6y ago
    That depends on who you are. Most notably, political campaigns use polls to decide where it’s most useful to spend their money. It’s also relevant to people who want to donate time/money and betting markets. It also may have an effect on turnout and peoples votes, but that’s a lot more wooly.
    • AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      Right, but political campaigns have their own polling organizations. They don't rely on outsiders to tell them what's going on.
      • dragonwriter 6y ago
        > Right, but political campaigns have their own polling organizations. “Internal” polls are polls that the campaign has contracted a polling organization, quite often an organization that does its own (or is contracted by media outlets to do) public polling, as well. Political campaigns are comparatively ephemeral, they don't have time to build polling organizations from scratch.
• rrauenza 6y ago
  A week ago we listened to this podcast by Nationak Review where they interview Robert Cahaly of Trafalgar. They may be the ones who got it the most right ... Again. They also discuss some of their methodologies: https://www.nationalreview.com/podcasts/the-editors/special-episode-the-pollster-who-thinks-trump-is-ahead/ https://www.nationalreview.com/podcasts/the-editors/special-...
• wyldfire 6y ago
  > More realistic modeling of the polls can correct for biases and add uncertainty for the biases we can’t correct. Yeah, I heard a pundit on NPR describe a polling bias that arises from individuals' distaste for the news agency conducting the poll. I would think you could model this phenomenon (and/or create a polling spinoff marketed with a more independent brand). However you slice it, it seems like the polls just aren't painting a picture as accurate as they have in decades past.
• lumost 6y ago
  I'd be curious on what statistical approach we could use to reject the alternate hypothesis - what if the polls were right and the election was tampered with?
  • thu2111 6y ago
    None. Technically the election is a poll, just with a sample size of 100% (by definition).
• titzer 6y ago
  American elections are by and large won or lost based on voter turnout, not preference. That leads to politicians stirring up anger and fear and their campaigns need a ground game to get people registered and to the polls. I believe in a constitutional amendment that guarantees all citizens the right to vote, including convicted felons. Not only that, but every citizen should be required to vote (or face a fine, like in Australia). Forget voter registration pushes and poll vans. There should be a whole department of government whose job it is to go out and collect your vote, the way they collect your taxes.
  • iratewizard 6y ago
    The party that captures most of the uninformed voters will push to make that happen. The party that doesn't will call it an affront to our republic.
  • tortarga 6y ago
    Mandatory voting would be the fastest way to "fix" America. Turnout based voting means you win by radicalizing your side to show up to vote. Most voters would fall into a bell curve of political preference and in the US that middle stays home. In Australia it forces both major parties back into the center so they don't scare off the majority of voters, and the extreme wings of either side typically hold little sway.
    • medium_burrito 6y ago
      I only support mandatory voting if there is a none of the above option, and that option means the office will remain unfilled.
      • istjohn 6y ago
        We cannot not have a President. Ranked choice voting would be a more practical reform.
        • medium_burrito 6y ago
• WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
  It's generally recognized that reporting unsubstantiated details, before the actual facts are known, is poor journalism. At best, polls are a simulated election, wrapped in a facade of a forecast. News orgs offer them as a surrogate for factual election results. It is unclear how presenting this inherently unreliable mess as news helps any voter choose a responsible candidate.
• hacknat 6y ago
  Polling is going to continue to get worse, because our politics is deranging. When you poll you have to weight certain demographic groups. What groups though? We’re splintering as a country. There were so many anomalies this election. Biden underperformed the suburban vote in the southeast, but not in the southwest, he under performed with Latinos in Texas and Florida, much more than Hillary did, but he did okay everywhere else. There doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to it. The demographics are no longer stable even within the same party. Trump did better amongst non-whites than he did in 2016, and worse among white women and the elderly than he did in 2016, how many pollsters saw that coming and appropriately weighted it? The demographic outcomes of this country are getting more and more unpredictable.
• deleted 6y ago
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• pwinnski 6y ago
  Maybe let's wait until the votes are counted before we start criticizing the polls? They could have been really dramatically off in many states, or in the end they could be really, really close. In most states, we don't actually know yet! He adds a P.S. suggesting Florida as a counter-example, but polls could be off in Florida without being off elsewhere. It just seems too soon to be doing analysis of a moving target.
• dalaidonkey 6y ago
  There was a link today about Nevada analysis but it's gone from the mainpage. Anyone knows which website I'm talking about? Or has a link?