Polling expert mystified by "spectacularly inaccurate" Dispatch Issue poll

[farmbo]

http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2005/11/election_result.html

Ohio. MP's instincts failed him with respect to the venerable Columbus Dispatch mail-in poll, which after decades of outperforming conventional telephone surveys turned in one of the more spectacularly inaccurate performances in recent memory. For example, the final Dispatch survey (subscription required) conducted October 24 through November had Issue 2 (vote by mail) running 26 points ahead (59% to 33%). It lost on Tuesday by 28 points (36% to 64%). Similarly, the poll had Issue 3 (limits on campaign contributions) running 36 points ahead (61% to 25%). It lost by an opposite 36 point margin (32% to 68%). These results had MP seriously wondering whether the pollsters or election officials had mistakenly transposed "yes" and "no" in their tables. The discrepancy was nearly as great for Issues 3 and 4 (on congressional redistricting and the role of the secretary of state).

MP will take a much closer look at what happened to the Dispatch poll in his next post, but if nothing else, these results underscore how "shark infested" the waters can be with respect to polling on ballot propositions (as another pollster put it in an email).
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This was AFTER Mystery Pollster had heaped praise on the CD Mail poll ONE WEEK EARLIER, observing how the Dispatch mail poll was FAR MORE ACCURATE than telephone polls on off-year ballot issues:
http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2005/11/polling_the_pro_4.html

While we wait for election returns - yes, actual returns this time, not leaked exit polls - in the key off-year contests, MP finds himself coming back to the difficulty of conducting pre-election polling for ballot propositions and referenda. And for all the different methodologies being tried in California, MP wonders why no one in California tried the back-to-the-future methodology of the Columbus Dispatch mail-in poll.

I wrote about the Dispatch poll just before the election last year, noting that an academic study published in Public Opinion Quarterly (POQ), the journal of academic survey methodology, found that the Dispatch poll reported an error rate of only 1.6 percentage points between 1980 and 1994, compared to error rates of 5 percentage points or higher for comparable telephone studies.
<snip>

And in case anyone has forgotten...the Dispatch Poll results on the only other statewide Issue on the Ohio ballot...Issue 1 (endorsed by Taft) was DEAD ON...predicting the actual outcome within 1%.

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1559

Memo to MysteryPollster: Maybe you should quit looking at the Dispatch's polling techniques, and start looking across Broad street in Columbus... into the seamy environs of Ken Blackwell's Election's Division.

[Botany]

1. But it is Ohio

'nuff said

[flpoljunkie]

2. Any coverage of this obvious anomaly in the Ohio press?

[nicknameless]

3. Ohio ... back in 2003. Remember when the votes resembled the exit polls?

http://www.freepress.org/departments.php?strFunc=display&strID=162&strYear=2003&strDept=9

Ohio Ballots, Computers, and Private Contractors
by Chris Shumway
April 22, 2003

The Toledo Blade reports that Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell is moving ahead with a plan to put computerized voting machines in all 88 Ohio counties by 2004. County election officials, we are told, will able to choose a ballot vendor from a list of pre-selected private corporations that program electronic voting machines. The state will write all the purchase contracts and pay for the machines.

This project is billed as vast improvement over current non-standardized voting systems. Officials also claim it is designed to protect Ohio from the ballot mess in Florida that threw the 2000 presidential election into the hands of the Supreme Court.

However, it's worth asking whether or not the vote recording and counting process, so crucial to fair elections, should be placed in the hands of private contractors who are not accountable to citizens? "You'd think in an open democracy," writes attorney Thom Hartmann in a recent article on CommonDreams.org, "that the government - answerable to all its citizens rather than a handful of corporate officers and stockholders - would program, repair, and control the voting machines."

Hartmann suggests that the recent trend in privatized vote counting has further muddied, rather than cleaned up, elections. He notes several recent political races where long-shot candidates upset opponents who looked to be winners based on results of formerly reliable exit polls. "Perhaps it's just a coincidence," he writes, "that the sudden rise of inaccurate exit polls happened around the same time corporate-programmed, computer-controlled, modem-capable voting machines began recording and tabulating ballots."

<snip>

[Kolesar]

4. Debunk-ee-fied

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x401315