Some See Numerical Oddity in Pollster’s Election Surveys

Carl Bialik, the “numbers guy” at the Wall Street Journal, writes here about a polling firm that has come under fire for the results it reported concerning the 2008 presidential election. Strategic Vision LLC, a polling firm based in Georgia, was the only polling firm that declined to release any information regarding where its polling numbers came from to the American Association for Public Opinion Research, the industry’s professional organization. Nate Silver, a statistician who writes a political blog, then examined the numbers that made up Strategic Vision’s polls and found extremely unlikely statistical anomalies. Subsequently, Strategic Vision was censured by the AAPOC and appears to have dropped the polling aspect of its business. Other anomalies have since surfaced in the firm’s polls, including one done for the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs which claimed to show (among other things) that only 23% of the high schoolers there knew who America’s first president was, and that about 10% of the students had listed the two major political parties as ‘Republican and Communist.’

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