Posted by
CKHustler on Friday, October 31, 2008 11:09:01 PM
Now, you may be thinking. AOL poll? Or, its a selective poll, the people have to choose to vote. Well, thinking this over, none of that actually matters in this poll. This poll is only open to people with AOL accounts. People cannot vote more than once as you must login to vote and unless you have hundreds of AOL accounts, a single person cannot do more than possibly their internet account and AIM account. That rules out fraud for this poll.
Sampling selectivity: Well, unless someone can prove that AOL users are more conservative than the average American, how can anyone possibly put biased as a possible reason?
Selective Poll: They all are. To tell a pollster you are for either candidate requires you making a choice. On this poll, it sits right on their homepage, so I would think the average AOL user would see it. If anyone has any level of commitment to vote this election, they can easily vote on it without more than 2 mouse clicks...probably one even. So unless you can claim that Obama supporters are less gungho(yea right) this point is also moot.
Sampling size: Well, seeing as this one averages over 350,000 a week, I can't imagine anyone arguing this point.
Any other possibilities? Ill try to think of some more and add them.
Im having trouble finding previous weeks actual voting tallies as it runs off a java looking program and it sends me to the current week poll when I try. I have found that last week McCain won with 56-44 over Obama at the end and there was 210,000 on day 5 of 7 of the voting. That means that there was probably about 300,000 voters last week with McCain getting 56% of them.
This link will be the link to the current poll, which started Oct 31st. There is already over 40,000 votes at the time of this post.
http://news.aol.com/political-machine/2008/10/31/aol-straw-poll-oct-31-nov-4/
Myself, I feel McCain is going to win in a landslide. I could be way off, but I feel he will. I wonder if this poll is a good sample of the average American?