How could this week’s election in the country of Colombia tell
us anything about the U.S. presidential election?
Simple. Reputable polls
there forecast an overwhelmingly favorable vote on the peace deal between the
government and rebels. The agreement
lost by a slim margin.
The moral of the story for us is that American media focuses
far too much on polling data about the presidential campaign. In many national polls, both Democrat Hillary
Clinton and Republican Donald Trump score in the forty percent range with only
a small gap between them.
National polls are wrong for two reasons. First, major defects have undermined the
accuracy of the surveys themselves.
Second, the president is not elected by the popular vote they try to
measure, but rather by the Electoral College.
Polls have serious flaws.
Many people refuse to answer. That
throws off the random selection of participants, essential for a valid result
by which the survey predicts the actions of all voters.
Pollsters adjust responses to compensate for imbalances
between women and men, Republicans and Democrats, old and young, north and
south. Some pollsters do better than
others, but the results are never just right.
Of course, the questionnaire itself may be biased and the
questions used by one pollster may not be the same as those used by
another. And the quality of the pollsters
from one state to another is likely to vary.
Some polls are conducted by recording machines, not real
human beings. So pollsters do not know
if the person responding is the person they wanted in the sample.
State-by-state polling reduces the error built into national
polling, but polling defects can deny us an accurate picture of the election.
The U.S. uses the secret ballot in elections for good
reason. Voters may not want to reveal
how they are voting and may even wish to misdirect others about their
intentions. There’s nothing wrong with
providing a less than truthful answer to a pollster, and it is likely that some
people do.
Such misdirection may also apply when panels of supposedly
undecided voters are assembled to ask candidates questions or rate how they did
in debates, often in what are known as “focus groups.”
There’s no way of knowing if those selected are truly
undecided or campaign plants. It’s
suspicious when voters, after hearing sharp differences, say they are unmoved
by a debate.
Finally, some so-called surveys are conducted among
participants who select themselves.
These polls are hardly “scientific” and are meaningless as a gauge of
voter sentiment. They are often used by
the candidates themselves.
The result of all these weaknesses in polling, given the great
daily attention by the news media, is that voters, who may be influenced by the
results, are almost certainly misinformed.
Even worse, the media and many voters are influenced by national
poll results, but there’s no nationwide election. The presidential election is conducted
state-by-state.
According to the Constitution, voters don’t cast their
ballots for president, but vote for Electors, people who will cast votes for
president on behalf of each state.
The Electors form what is known as the Electoral College,
reflecting the original constitutional compromise that recognized both
population and the individual states.
Each state gets a number of electoral votes equal to its number of
members of the U.S. House of Representatives plus two, the number of senators.
In 49 of the jurisdictions – 48 states plus the District of
Columbia – all the electoral votes go to their popular vote winners. It does not matter if the winner had a
one-vote margin or a half-million-vote margin.
Maine has four electoral votes. Two are allocated to the statewide winner. Each of the other two is selected in one of
the two congressional districts. So the
Maine winner may gain three or four of the state’s votes. Nebraska, with three congressional districts,
adopted the Maine plan.
The Electoral College undermines the validity of national
polling results. Clinton may win by a
big margin in California and Trump by a big margin in Texas, but their excess
popular votes cannot be used elsewhere.
The system works exactly as intended – to help small states count
in presidential elections. It gives
Maine almost twice the weight as population alone would give it.
In Colombia and in the recent British vote on Brexit, the
polls were wrong. These were both major,
national elections. The polls may also
be wrong here as well.
Most likely, it’s advisable to decide on voting without allowing
yourself to be influenced by questionable polls.
No comments:
Post a Comment