Polling methods can change results
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One headline this week blared: âBush leads by 8 points.â Another had Bush up by 3 percentage points. Three other national polls showed the presidential race in a dead heat.
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Strange twists may lie ahead in an already suspenseful presidential race: a disputed ballot count, an inconclusive vote ultimately resolved by lawmakers or even a sentiment-shifting capture of Osama bin Laden are just a few possibilities and bizarre twists.
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November 6, 2004 â An  Open Source web based Survey tool is playing a key role in keeping track of voting irregularities in todayâs US Presidential Elections. PHPSurveyor (http://phpsurveyor.sourceforge.net), a PHP based online survey tool, is being used to gather data across the United States about all voting irregularities. In the first 10 hours of voting alone, over 13500 incidents had been recorded using the software. The tool was selected by the Verified Voting Foundation as part of their Election Incident Reporting System (http://www.verifiedvoting.org/eirs/) as one of three major system components â all of which are Open Source.    The Advokit tool provides a structure within which campaign leaders can match volunteers to tasks, and manage task completion. The MapServer tool displays clickable maps. PHPSurveyor is used to allow Verified Votingâs thousands of volunteers across the United States to enter voting irregularities and incidents online as the day progresses. Researchers can view the collected data in real time by mining down through a map of the US, viewing incidents at a Nationwide, Statewide, or County level.  PHPSurveyor developer Jason Cleeland said âIâm very excited that my tool is being used for a project of this scale and importance. Itâs an indication both of the success of Open Source as a development strategy, and itâs flexibility in allowing organizations to freely bend an existing project to new uses.â  âWhile PHPSurveyor is generally a tool for simple development and collection of survey responses online, the Verified Voting Foundations âTechWatchâ group of technologists have been able to integrate it with realtime reporting mechanisms that allow legal teams and press across the United States, and the world, to respond immediately to any problems in the Presidential elections as they occur.â  PHPSurveyor was first developed in 2003 by Jason Cleeland in response to his organisationâs need for a better way to run and record surveys. âPaper based surveys were effective, but required a large commitment in terms of staff resourcing,â Mr Cleeland said. âFor a non-profit organisation, finding the time for staff to perform the required data entry was a real problem. Yet at the same time, we had a constant need to run surveys of our members. Writing an online survey tool solved these problems. It eliminated the double-handling of the respondent completing the survey, and a data entry operator transferring that response to computerâ said Mr Cleeland. âInstead, the respondent completes the survey online, and the data is immediately available for review.â  From a relatively basic system, the tool quickly grew a wider feature set. âIt was the release of the software on Sourceforge as an Open Source GPL product that really broadened PHPSurveyors outlookâ said Mr Cleeland. âWithin a matter of weeks some IT developers from a public non-profit TV station in Dallas, Texas had started adding code and providing improvements. And since then, more ideas, suggestions, and improvements have flowed from all over the world on a constant and sometimes overwhelming basis.â  At the time of writing PHPSurveyor had collected over 23500 incident reports on the US Presidential election, with 13500 being entered in the 10 hours since voting commenced. âI expect that by the close of polls there will be around 30 to 35,000 entriesâ Mr Cleeland said, âand that by the time all the paper reports have also been collected the tool will have collected at least 40,000 responses. This is very exciting to watch â to see a tool that was intended to handle around 1000 survey responses, to one that can collect - in a very short time frame â over 40,000 indicates to me the benefits of opening source code to the world.â
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Electronic voting has improved since the 2004 elections. however, many problems with security, reliability, and operation still remain.
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Touch-screen voting machines in the Sunshine State insist 18,000 voters had no preference in a congressional race won by fewer than 400 votes. A recount is under way, but that just means printing a hard copy of the contested ballots. By Kim Zetter.
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Text of report by Estonian newspaper Postimees website on 5 September  [Commentary by Rein Veidemann: "Media Circus"]  Elections make for fatty raw material to the free media. The supply of news and opinions is far greater than the demand.
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Voters in recent surveys are more frequently describing themselves as Republicans, a shift that could affect November elections up and down the ticket if it continues.
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In the weeks leading up to November in the US, it&#8217;s abundantly clear that this is not &#8220;election season&#8221; but rather &#8220;polling season&#8221;; with the actual voting still some ways off, our pundits must resort to polls and surveys as an estimate of what the will of the people will be on Election Day. But just how accurate are the samples in those polls?
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Inside the battle for a critical chunk of votes
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Electronic voting in the US. The saga continues. Here is an interesting comparision with a Venezuelan referendum. &quot;80% of Americans could correctly name the first President Bush&#39;s pet dog Millie, but only
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Like many of you, I spent a long time watching the election returns come in, and I saw the election eventually handed to George Bush.  I saw exit polls that did not correspond to the results in certain states.  I heard about the diebold president talking about using his machines to turn the election.  I have spent a long time over the past day checking information about the election, information from 2000, comparing data.  And after all of this, I feel I am able to post a list of some questionable data that I have seen:
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Preliminary results of a recount in New Hampshire verify that optical-scan voting machines recorded votes accurately. A Nader spokesman calls on Democrats to do some soul-searching. By Kim Zetter.
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While most voters have chosen their favorite candidate for president, several sites offer online tests for the undecided. In some cases, the results can be quite contradictory. By Joanna Glasner.
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Political polling outfits exclude cell phone users from this year's presidential surveys. But a new survey indicates that mobile phone users are a distinct voting group whose ballot preferences might not be reflected in traditional polls. By Elisa Batista.
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Small additions can lead to big changes.
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Results of recent polls on the presidential race. Listed above each set of results is the name of the organization that conducted the poll, the dates, the number interviewed, whether they were adults, registered voters (RV) or likely voters (LV) and the margin of error (MoE). Results might not total 100 percent because of rounding.
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A server crashes, disrupting the pre-election test of electronic voting machines in West Palm Beach. Critics say this underscores the unreliability of e-voting, while election officials say all glitches will be fixed.