Reply #11: About The Sarah Palin Poll From John Siceloff, Executive Producer, NOW on PBS

[BrklynLiberal]

http://www.pbs.org/now/palin-poll.html

I am writing in reference to the now famous "Palin poll" that appeared on the NOW on PBS homepage on September 5. It's no longer on the homepage; in fact, it's no longer a page that the online user can navigate to using menus, but hundreds of thousands of unique visitors are still accessing the poll and voting. How is that possible, and is that a good thing? More on that in a moment, after a side trip through the world of Internet "cookies."

PBS headquarters made the decision on September 22, to implement a cookie registration system on the Palin poll. That system is now part of the poll's inner code, and as of September 23, a user can only vote once per computer. PBS acted because the entire pbs.org site had been experiencing system overload due to massive accessing of the poll.

The poll asks the question, "Do you think that Sarah Palin is qualified to serve as Vice President of the United States?" The user answers clicks to answer "Yes" or "No." From September 5 to September 22, our software allowed online users to vote repeatedly. Sounds bad, right? But we at NOW had serious concerns about user privacy. "Cookies" are small text files placed on the user's system without that person's knowledge. Many computer users regard them as invasive.
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UPDATE: As of October 15th, the Palin poll had received over 52 million votes. We've received inquiries about why the percentages in the poll results have not changed much in the last couple of weeks. There's a simple answer. There are so many votes now that even the hundreds of thousands of new votes each day don't have much of an effect on the overall totals.

Another question is about math. As of October 15th, the "Yes" answer had 49%, the "No" answer had 49% and the "Not Sure", 0%. The question is why these numbers don't add up to 100%. Here's the reason: the poll software rounds the results down to the nearest whole number. The "Not Sure" is less than one percent, so it rounds down to zero. The rounding-down is why why the numbers may not total 100%.

With all the questions--and answers--about the percentages and the math, it's easy to take a further step and regard the results as accurate and scientific. Not so! The Palin poll is a measure of voter interest and mobilization in the closing weeks of the campaign. It should not be taken as an accurate barometer of the views of the wider public about Sarah Palin's qualifications.