CHICAGO, Sept. 29 (UPI) -- An online service offers a poll to its subscribers, asking them whom they prefer for president of the United States in the Nov. 2 election -- George W. Bush or John F. Kerry. A sample of 250,000 "votes" is taken and a landslide is declared for one of the candidates.
Is the poll more accurate than a small sample of public opinion, interviews with 1,000 people, taken by a behavioral scientist, over the telephone? Probably not, experts told United Press International.
Some forms of online polling are not scientifically sound, and calling an important presidential election based on the results of these online surveys -- at least now, in 2004 -- is risky.
The science of statistics and probability is an important factor in discerning between the soundness and unsoundness of polls. Moreover, polls are most effective when they are done randomly, eliminating the chance participants will game the system, experts told UPI.
"Randomness is needed to reduce bias in surveys," J. Michael Dennis, vice president and managing director of Knowledge Networks Inc., an online polling firm in Menlo Park, Calif., told UPI. "There's a big risk with a volunteer panel -- self-selection biases. Those who are on the Internet are generally more informed about politics than the average American. That changes the results of the survey."
Frequent online visitors also are more likely to have a higher income than the general population -- enabling them to afford the monthly fees to access America Online, Earthlink, and other Internet Service Providers.
That kind of wealth bias in polling was seen in the 1930s, when telephone polls first were conducted for a presidential election.
"Even with large sample sizes, like the 250,000 cited in your example, you fall into the trap that pollsters fell into 70 years ago, with a sample size more than 10 times that," J. Patrick McGrail, assistant professor of communications at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pa., told UPI. "They failed to predict the victory of Roosevelt. That's because they used people who owned a telephone -- an expensive and relatively rare device back then."
An analysis by RealClearPolitics.com of scientific polls, taken by leading news organizations, showed President Bush, for the week Sept. 20-27, holds an average 5.6 percentage point lead over Kerry in the race for the White House.
That average is generated by examining polls, such as the CBS News poll showing Bush beating Kerry 51 percent to 42 percent, as well as other, closer polls, such as the Fox News poll that shows the president ahead of the Democratic nominee 46 percent to 41 percent.
Another poll in the mix, conducted by Investor's Business Daily, shows the race in a statistical dead heat, at 45 percent for each main candidate, with Ralph Nader generating 2 percent support.
"These polls represent households representative of people across the United States," Dennis said. "What the pollster has to look at are factors like age, gender and education. It's also important to look beyond that -- for attitudes, knowledge and behaviors -- and to determine if it is representative along those lines as well. This is a way to bridge the digital divide online."
Some pollsters have tried to eliminate the online bias by screening samples of online voters and then randomly selecting them. Such polls have been used successfully on the Internet for test marketing and test branding of new products, helping major companies determine what the best brand strategy might be for a particular product, or what features to add, or eliminate, in a new technology.
Knowledge Networks will be using a hybrid online polling technique Thursday night to poll 200 undecided voters for CBS News during the course of the first presidential debate.
"These people will take a survey of attitudinal questions," Dennis said. "We will see where they stand before the debate. During the debate, we will register their warmth or coldness toward a particular candidate. That will be relayed to CBS in real-time for their analysis."
Even with provisions for making the online surveys random and representative, some experts remain skeptical.
"Our feeling is that these polls are just about worthless, have no accuracy whatsoever," Michael Hamill Remaley, a director of Public Agenda, a non-profit research organization in New York City, told UPI.
A number of experts told UPI they were concerned account holders at AOL and other online services could create multiple account names and vote several times with different nom de plumes.
"Allowing users to vote only once hardly qualifies as a proper control," said Dana Harsell, assistant professor of political science at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y. "AOL lets its subscribers create many sub-accounts, so it is possible to vote multiple times on accounts that a person created for their personal correspondence, their home office, or even their children."
Though some online polling techniques might not be scientific enough for many of these analysts, the technology has proven quite effective at harnessing other types of public opinion.
On the Democratic National Committee's Web site, Democrats.org, the DNC notes it has "been conducting a major petition drive in partnership with MoveOn.org." The drive, conducted last fall, generated more than 300,000 signatures, and more than 172,000 of them in one, 36-hour period, the DNC said.
In addition to petition drives, there are other effective techniques to monitor public sentiment online. Accenture Technology Labs, a unit of Accenture, a consulting company, has developed a tool that "intercepts and instantly analyzes" Internet chatter about political races, new products or proposed public policies, said Ed Trapasso, a spokesman for Accenture in New York City.
"Some tests have shown the tool to be more accurate than Internet polling," he added.
Pundits are not completely writing off online polling, however -- just yet. They reckon the technology will be improved with time.
"I wouldn't take the position that online polling is awful and never going to be any good," John McIntyre, founder of RealClearPolitics.com, an online political news site in Chicago, told UPI. "It might be something that they can figure out in 2006, 2008, or 2012."
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