Blog 5

Well, I’m till not 100% sure how polling works and all but from what I know about the 2016 presidential election the polls were pretty off since Donald Trump had one where as I recall Hillary being up in the polls. I figured for this blog, since it’s kind of extremely late, I would just share my stance on polls. I’m not sure exactly how to answer the prompt questions but I’ll try as I go along. I know polling is important to a lot of people but I also feel like there are many faults to it. From what I understand is it’s just basically like reporters asking people who they voted for or who they plan to vote for. This works well because it gives a good estimate of who will win the election. But for people who choose not to tell the truth to the reporter, well this causes problems because then they are presenting the wrong information to the population which gives them the wrong impression which means some people won’t even go out and vote. This is because they could see their candidate losing and just lost hope on it. I know we talked about this happening in a section of Florida sine part of the state is in one time zone and another part is in a different time zone.

If I was conducting polls I would for sure state that the people being asked are going to take the poll seriously in order to put out the best information to the public. Instead of harassing the people in order to find out who they voted for I might create some incentive to have them come tell me who they voted for. The goal would be to come up with a way for people to want to tell me who they voted for. This would help because people would be more honest about who they voted for. I’m not exactly sure what the incentive would be but I feel as if this would help a little. I also would ask questions revolving around which parties they usually tend to vote for, or which party they see themselves a part of in order find more demographic information and sort through it. By sorting a categorizing information like this I would be able to inform others as to who voted for who if that makes sense. If people were staying in their own parties to vote or in like this past election changing their votes to the other party. I also plan to ask more questions than just “Who did you vote for?” because this will lead people to think that more information is being sought after and it’ll be a little more settling and comforting for some people because personally I would hate if someone just came up to me and asked who I voted for and that was it. I would probably lie just to get them to go away if that was all they wanted to know.