You’re totally right about the distinction between campaign and official polling, fair point.
Still, I do think there are means available for pollsters to get more accurate results from younger voters if they so choose. MFA can solve the identity problem well enough, but there are better solutions if we want them. For example, I’d love to have an anonymous, secure, unique voter id which could be used by individuals to verify voting results independently after an election concludes. If we had it, we could use that instead.
We absolutely should not have such an ID. People buying votes would ask you to show them your verified vote on your phone before you get paid. There’s a long history behind anything that could let you show your vote to another person after the fact, even voluntarily, and we’ve banned them for a reason. It’s one of those problems that we’ve solved so well that people forget why those rules are there.
Morning Consult does online polling, and they seem to do OK. If you look through the FiveThirtyEight polls, you’ll notice they sometimes have an unusually large sample size, like 10k registered voters when most others have between 1k-3k. That’s because they gather a whole lot of people in their polls, but the result isn’t particularly random. They then have to apply weights to get something like a random sample.
Where do they get those weights and how do we know they’re valid? That’s a very good question. They match up with other polls, but those other polls have problems that we’re trying to get away from.
You’re totally right about the distinction between campaign and official polling, fair point.
Still, I do think there are means available for pollsters to get more accurate results from younger voters if they so choose. MFA can solve the identity problem well enough, but there are better solutions if we want them. For example, I’d love to have an anonymous, secure, unique voter id which could be used by individuals to verify voting results independently after an election concludes. If we had it, we could use that instead.
We absolutely should not have such an ID. People buying votes would ask you to show them your verified vote on your phone before you get paid. There’s a long history behind anything that could let you show your vote to another person after the fact, even voluntarily, and we’ve banned them for a reason. It’s one of those problems that we’ve solved so well that people forget why those rules are there.
Morning Consult does online polling, and they seem to do OK. If you look through the FiveThirtyEight polls, you’ll notice they sometimes have an unusually large sample size, like 10k registered voters when most others have between 1k-3k. That’s because they gather a whole lot of people in their polls, but the result isn’t particularly random. They then have to apply weights to get something like a random sample.
Where do they get those weights and how do we know they’re valid? That’s a very good question. They match up with other polls, but those other polls have problems that we’re trying to get away from.