It’s the 21st Century! We’re supposed to be driving flying cars and walking our pet robots. Out with the old, in with the new!
I hear this stuff a lot. One of my favorite YouTube creators was irate that he had to confirm his identity with a – gasp – mail in card. It’s the 21st Century! Why can’t we just hop on a Zoom call?
He had a point because he had a slew of videos to compare to his smiling face so in his case I suppose that would suffice. But the only ways to confirm a physical address is to either go there or get the Post Office to go for you.
Bots can’t handle snail mail. That’s the real answer to his question.
The answer to the question in the title is equally simple: because it works. In six thousand years of human history we’ve improved the tire many times but the good old round wheel remains the go to for all things transportation.
Electronic voting is like a square wheel – it’s new, different and stupid. Not too long ago a YouTube channel about technology got taken over by a scam. If guys who are good at computers can get scammed, how safe are voters who don’t even know how to turn on the tabulating machine?
Truth is, the safest way to vote is in person, on paper. Anything else is vulnerable to tampering.
At least voting has protections attached – not that they always work – but not so much with polling. The only thing more useless than an Internet poll is made up statistics. Heck, the made up numbers might even be right once in a while. Not so sure with any poll that is conducted online.
Or on cellphones. Polling is supposed to be representative of the entire population, not just the folks bored enough to pick up the phone and answer questions. Sure, they use weighting to try and correct the data for the fact that its skewy but putting your thumb on the scale is not the most reliable way to get the thing to work right.
It’s hard enough to get people to open their mail but at least when it comes back you know a human filled it out. A really young human if its in crayon, but still human.
Okay, so focus groups are really people, right? Yes, they are – real people who have the time to participate. Dunno about you, but when I was working at Walmart I didn’t exactly have a lot of free time for focus groups. Most people don’t. So focus groups also end up badly skewed. But they tell you a lot about upper middle class opinions.
The more we depend on electronic media to conduct our surveys the less reliable they become. Partially because of the representation issue I mentioned; mostly because bots are a thing.
Influencing a poll to show Candidate A is ahead of Candidate B can actually affect the outcome of the election. People vote for some strange reasons so it shouldn’t be a surprise that ‘everyone else is’ is one of those reasons.. Also there’s ‘I wanna back a winner’. Both result in people voting for a candidate only because they thought that candidate was ahead in the polls.
It can backfire, too. Clinton was supposedly comfortably ahead of Trump going into 2016. The result was a lot of Democrats staying home since they didn’t think their vote would be needed.
Misdirecting polls and surveys have far reaching effects. The polls show that most people think X is okay. They show people support Y. They show ‘most Americans’ believe Z. People tend to conclude a thing is correct if ‘most’ people seem to think so. Part of that is human laziness but part is that we don’t have enough hours in the day to consider all topics fully. When it isn’t something important to us at the moment, it’s easy to just assume the majority knows what it’s talking about.
Only that ‘majority’ doesn’t exist. Polls can quickly become propaganda. Sadly, polls are often used this way. We can’t completely eliminate the problem.
But we can dang sure minimize it.
I know, I know, you can text with your thumbs and have never been off of a cellphone for more than ten minutes. The very idea that we should use ‘old’ methods to ensure our voting and information gathering is as secure as possible is just too much. Why, next thing you’ll be suggesting pollsters go door to door!
Darn tootin’. Old isn’t always best. Old isn’t always worse, either.
Now, this may shock you but there’s no substitute for face to face. A pollster is far more likely to get people to answer the poll if they are standing in front of them. It’s not a magic trick – you will get doors slammed in your face – but a far more varied group will actually give you the time of day if they are looking at you eyeball to eyeball.
Before you protest, remember that we live in a time when couples break up by email or worse, ghosting. Ignoring people electronically seems to be a birthright. But you can’t just delete the nice guy standing on your doorstep. The same group that can’t stand to talk straight to their soon to be former significant other aren’t going to quite know how to handle a live pollster. Some will flee behind the door but a lot will just get it over with.
People are weird, yes. But we have nearly a century of experience handling weird polling behavior with people. Bots, not so much. We can overcome a lot of the limitations by simply doing the work in person. We’re not nearly as good at it electronically. Hacking the poll is just too easy.
In person has a limitation that may well prove to be a benefit: it’s expensive. You have to hire and train the folks who will go door to door. They tend to want to be paid decently and if you don’t want to have to train even more of them, paying well is a necessity. Micropolls, of which I am no fan, sample around 1000 people. So poll workers have to knock on a minimum of 1000 doors. In reality, it will be at least 2000.
But to do a REALLY good poll, plan on tens of thousands. Just gathering that many is expensive; tabulating ain’t free, either.
Now you know why pollsters prefer phone and Internet polling. They don’t, really, it’s just the only thing they can afford.
How is that a possible benefit, you ask? Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret: weekly polling is moronic. First, it doesn’t measure anything – polls are supposed to measure something! – because opinions simply don’t change that fast. Second, constant polling leads to people getting multiple poll calls which quickly leads to people never answering. All the incessant polling makes itself less reliable simply by annoying the daylights out of the public.
In person polling can’t be done incessantly simply because no one, not even Elon Musk, could afford to do even biweekly in person polls on a country of 330 million people. Fewer polls will mean pollsters will have to be much more selective about when they poll and what exactly they wish to measure. Over time, it will likely increase the public’s willingness to participate. At the very least, fewer people will be ticked off.
This is part of the reason for in person voting. But the main reason for that is it’s a LOT easier to confirm a person is who they say they are in person than it is when you are just looking at an envelope.
The Constitution establishes that citizens are the ones who vote in our elections. The living breathing kind, not the graveyard occupant. In person voting stops a lot of election shenanigans.
We steer this crazy government of ours with our votes. This great experiment in government by the People will end the instant the People no longer believe their vote matters or is even counted.
I know, I know, it’s such a pain to show up at the polls on voting day. But it’s the most important thing you will do for your country and all the crazy people in it.
Yourself included.
