Polling's Secrecy Problem - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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In the polling world, no survey firm releases its microdata in a timely manner. When pollsters release it at all — usually months after publication, to an archive that requires a paid subscription for access — they seldom provide the detailed methodological explanations necessary to replicate the survey results.
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Critics have raised charges of full-scale fabrication, like that alleged in the LaCour study, about a handful of pollsters in recent years, and such a wholly fraudulent poll might well be able to evade detection.
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But a bigger problem is that pollsters may be using questionable means to ensure that their results end up in a certain place. Any poll is required to make judgments about exactly how to weight the sample or decide who is likely to vote. But such choices can swing the results by several percentage points, and these decisions can be made with the results in mind.
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