Assignment #6-Election Statistics

- I read CBS Election STatistics on the CBS NEWS website.
They state that Jerry Brown has 51% of the votes while Meg Whitman has 49% of the votes. The source for the data was that it came from Exit Polls made my EDISON RESEARCH. The poll is referrred to as the National Election Pool.

-WHO-Edison Research conducted these exit polls for the National Election Pool.
-WHY-These polls were conducted to project election results for the public.
-WHERE-These surveys wereconducted at polling places in California chosen by probability since they were stratified samples in California.
-WHAT- Researchers asked voters about their ballot as they exited the polls.
-WHEN-The election took place on November 2,2010.
-HOW-Researches asked every nth person about their ballot as they exited the polls.


-The data is somewhat accurate because they used stratified samples to conduct their poll surveys and this is part of random sampling which gives more accurate results. It is alsp seemingly not accurate because it says that all samples are approximations which is a sampling error.

-In the research report, it says that absentees and mail-in ballots were interviewed in a pre-election telephone poll so not all the data came from exit polls. This was done by a Random-Digit-Dialing(RDD) and there is error from nonresponse. This would've not made much of an impact if CBS would have reported this along with their data since the data is combined anyways.

-The only bias that would've probably occurred in this data is nonresponse and approximation. The characteristics of each person and the proportions of these characteristics affected the data in that it had a larger sampling error or a smaller one. People that weren't contacted by telephone interviewers could've affected the data even more. The location of the voting polls in which exit polls were conducted could have made a huge impact on the data. For example, the exit polls were maybe only conducted in areas that are known to be in a Democratic district which obviously would yield favor to Democrat votes.