The Case for Closing Down Polls Sixty Days before Elections

Everyone wants to be on the winning side in a contest. That’s human nature. Who wants to be a loser, right? And you can make the case that no contest is more important than the election of a politician. Yeah, Tom Brady is important and who wins a football match on any given Sunday may get our personal blood in a bubble, but what’s going on in your school board, city hall or Washington counts for more.

Cliches exist for a reason and “you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you” is a truism

Despite the great Redford-Newman sting in the movie of the same name, there is a reason the betting window closes when the horses leave the gate. It’s meant to insure no gambler has an unfair advantage over others. Gambling, in this instance, is taken far more seriously that who will sit in the White House or which party will dominate the House of Representatives or Senate.

Any logical mind, Democrat, Independent or Republican, would wonder why polling in politics is allowed all the way down the home stretch

The reason is that we are a media-driven society and all one needs to do is follow the money. Newspapers, television and what has now come to be known as social media thrives (and profits) on controversy, chaos, opposing opinions and kitten pictures. We might even agree that polls were a good idea, if they provided useful information.

But they don’t.

Presumably, the three most accurate political polls in the nation are Quinnipiac,  USC Dornslife and NBC News/Wall Street Journal. At least so it was judged after the 2016 elections by the Washington Post.

But accuracy is not my concern here. Influence is my concern and we have many laws that attempt to eliminate influence in our elections, but none that target the influence of polls in what is supposed to be a free and unbiased media.

(Washington Post) Each campaign season, pollsters conduct hundreds of pre-election surveys, feeding the apparently endless public and news media appetite for agonizing over the poll results. When the polls don’t accurately forecast the final election results, many are disillusioned or even angry. That was especially true in 2016, when most national polls projected that Hillary Clinton would win the presidency.

How large are the ‘samples’ contacted by polling organizations for national contests?

Quinnipiac boasts its large sample sizes, stating that “survey results regularly consist of over 1,000 respondents, allowing important subgroups to be examined and to minimize the sampling margin of error.”

That’s important to know. They based their probability on dialing up a thousand citizens in a nation of 340 million. Wow. That’s a percentage of the population so small that I can’t figure out how many zeroes to place after the decimal. And it’s interesting to realize that in a nation of cell-phones, only those with land lines can be reached. Double wow.

USC Dornsife went after six times as many opinions. “A total of more than 6,400 eligible voters who are members of CESR’s Understanding America Study, a probability-based internet panel, participated at least once, with an average of about 5,300 participants per wave. Tracking poll participants answered questions every other week about who they intended to vote for. Once a month they answered a longer poll which focused on what they care about most in the election, their attitude about the election, and their preferred candidates.”

Interesting. Keeping tabs on the same people. Nothing very random about that.

NBC News/Wall Street Journal doesn’t bother to tell you who they poll or how they are selected, just give updates you can take or reject on pure faith. Makes a certain amount of sense as America is said to be a faith-based society.

Which is still not my gripe, so let’s get down to the nitty and the gritty

Our election participants are an unpredictable group, made up of die-hard Republicans, always-liberal Democrats, disenchanted Independents, single-party voters on both sides, split-ticketers, the undecided and the disinterested. If a common-denominator did exist, it would probably be found in wanting to be among the winners or—at least—among your close friends. Increasingly, we Americans tend to work, live and associate among our comfortable political tribes. Few of us want to be on the wrong side of our neighbors.

That said, exit-polls tend to discourage those whose favorite is likely to lose from even showing up at the voting booth. That’s the why-even-bother excuse. Equally possible, but diametrically opposed are those who will get off their couch to help their gal or guy get over the finish line if things are close. That’s the by-god-we-have-to-win bunch and one is as failed as the other in their reasoning.

America is four time zones wide and many polls remain open after others have closed

If you live in the Mid-west, Rocky Mountains or Pacific Coast, there will be plenty of media breathlessly pontificating on what exit-polls are predicting from the East Coast, long before your polling place at the local schoolhouse has closed. In far too many cases, “Fuck it, I’ll stay home” is a likely result. What ‘early returns are showing’ flies in the face of ‘one man, one vote’ and that is particularly true in close elections.

If I had my way I’d do what they do in France

They don’t do primaries. They don’t spend a year tearing each other to pieces and then deciding to allow the least-torn to have at each other. They campaign for a month, then have an election. If no one candidate gets over 50% of the vote (very likely), the top two candidates face off in two weeks.

Then it’s over.

Someone governs.

That might be simplistic, but what we have now is a nightmare

Besides that, I’m not going to get my way.

But we have an election coming in less than three weeks and won’t assess the wreckage until it’s over. The polling opinions of less than 10,000 people are going to steer that. Talk about inexperienced drivers at the wheel. How long do we want to keep doing that?