Our polls are NOT scientific

We’re going to be continuing with our exit polls today, which seemed to be a success in creating lots of buzz among the “chattering classes” and H Street crowds. We’ve had a lot of questions and I want to make one thing clear: our polls are not scientific.

There is no margin of error; we are simply taking “reports from the field” and compiling them into graphical form to show trends of voters. We can tell you now that our percentages are not 100 percent accurate. We are not talking to every voter and we’re not recording who passes us without answering. We are not at every location at every time of the day.

We don’t pretend that our poll is as accurate as the actual balloting. Obviously that’s not the case, which is why we are reluctant to put the physical vote totals of each candidate per location.

That’s not to say that we don’t have faith in our numbers. We are confident that this year’s exit poll is accurately reflecting what is happening inside the ballot boxes/computer modules.

So hopefully this clears up any misconceptions on our poll. It’s interesting to see the candidates grasping at these polls. We won’t deny that it is flattering. We hope that everyone just keeps in mind that we are not publishing the actual vote totals, it’s just an general assessment of basic voter trends.

But that’s not to say that these exit polls don’t count. In fact, they played a huge role last year in the election of current SA President Audai Shakour ‘06. Shakour, who was down in our polls at the end of the first day, mobilized his force on the second day and came back to lead, eventually taking SA Sen. Ben Traverse ‘06 to the run-off and then the victory.

So we’ll see what happens today.