I know I am getting ridiculous, having posted this twice in the Ohio fraud diary, but this is a huge point that needs to be circulated before a harmful and misinformed meme develops.
To wit: earlier in kovie's recommended diary, "Possible HUGE Election '05 Ohio Election Fraud," kos and others trashed the Columbus Dispatch poll that predicted victory for at least two of the Reform Ohio Now measures. The poll was a mail-in and therefore junk. Many of use took that argument at face value.
Not so fast. No less a respected pollster than Mark Blumenthal, aka the Mystery Pollster, confirms that this poll has a strong track record. It does also confirm that mail-in polls are held in very low regard. But Blumenthal thinks that dismissal of the C-D polls' methodology is a mistake. Link.
Excerpts, boldface added:
There is one poll I have been dying to write about since I started this blog. It has a surprisingly strong track record and, as luck would have it, happens to survey only voters in Ohio, one of the most important battleground states in the nation.
Follow the flip.
Four years ago, four highly respected academic survey methodologists took a close look at this survey and concluded:
It has been strikingly accurate in forecasting election outcomes since 1980, with an average error of only 1.6 percentage points.
They have been substantially more accurate than telephone polls forecasting the same races conducted by the University of Akron (average error = 5.4 percentage points), the University of Cincinnati (average error = 4.9 percentage points), each of which has average error rates reported [for most pre-election polls nationwide] by Crespi (1988) and King (1993)." [From Visser, Krosnick, Marquette and Curtin (2000), p. 227]
As it happens, this survey just released its final pre-election numbers on Saturday. It shows a dead heat between Bush and Kerry (50% to 50%).
So why haven't you heard more about this highly accurate survey? Because the poll I'm talking about is the Columbus Dispatch Mail Poll, and like the late Rodney Dangerfield, it gets no respect.
I have a hunch that may be about to change.
For years, politicos and pollsters scoffed at mail-in polls. After all, we know the history of the Literary Digest mail-in surveys that wrongly predicted that Alf Landon would defeat Franklin Roosevelt. And most political sophisticates considered mail surveys too slow and their response rates too low in comparison to telephone surveys. Well, a lot has changed in 20 years.
Unlike the mail-in polls of old, the Dispatch poll draws random probability samples from the most recent registered voter list available from the Ohio Secretary of State. Unlike telephone surveys, the Dispatch can sample from the voter lists without concern for unlisted or missing telephone numbers. Then send out over 10,000 packets by U.S. Mail, each containing a cover letter on Columbus Dispatch letterhead, a questionnaire and a postage paid return envelope. They design the paper questionnaire so it closely resembles the look of the actual ballot. They do several surveys during the course of an election year, but on the final survey, they omit the undecided category, thereby forcing voters to chose the way they do in the voting booth."
Google the phrase "mail-in surveys for forecasting elections." This article is the third result. Kovie, you may want to update your update. Not all mail-in polls are not prima facie bunk, it seems, and this mail-in poll has a track record that justifies the assertion in the Fitrakis/Wasserman article.