Remember the "reluctant republican" exit poll excuse in 2004? used by Cons in Britain too in 1992

[yurbud]

I was looking for polling organizations and stumbled across this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shy_Tory_Factor

Shy Tory Factor
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search

Shy Tory Factor is a name given by British Opinion polling companies to a phenomenon observed in the 1990s whereby the share of the vote won by the Conservative Party in elections was substantially higher than the proportion of people in opinion polls who said they would vote for the party. The Conservative Party is often referred to by the name of its predecessor party, 'the Tory party'.

In the 1992 general election, the final opinion polls gave the Conservatives between 38% and 39% of the vote, about 1% behind Labour. In the final results, the Conservatives had a lead of 7.6% over Labour. As a result of this failure to 'predict' the result, the Market Research Society held an inquiry into the reasons why the polls had been so much at variance with actual public opinion. The report found that 2% of the 8.5% error in the party lead could be explained by differential refusals to be interviewed by Conservative voters; it cited as evidence for this factor the fact that exit polls on election day also underestimated the Conservative lead, when they could not be affected by sampling error.

After the election, most opinion pollsters altered their methodology to try to correct for the observed behaviour of the electorate being less likely to admit to voting Conservative. The methods varied for different companies. Some asked their interviewees how they had voted at the previous election, and assumed that those who had voted Conservative before but were now unsure or refusing to answer would return to the party. Others weighted their panel so that their past vote was exactly in line with the actual result of the election. For a time, opinion poll results were published both for unadjusted and adjusted methods.

[applegrove]

1. They didn't have voting machines in Britain. Just as I though..conservatives

misrepresent their votes to pollsters and the evening voters think it is a win for their liberal guy..and stay home. IMHO

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. And it was believable here in the UK

as the poster above says, there were no voting machines involved in the UK (it should also be noted, though, that exit polls cannot be released in the UK until voting has closed, so misleading an exit pollster won't affect anyone's decision to vote that day).

People were embarrassed to vote Tory then; after the poll tax was introduced, the Tories were definitely seen as the greedy party. I can remember a conversation in which a couple of friends who I knew had voted Tory in 1987 kept very quiet, when other people expressed amazement that anyone with 2 brain cells and a conscience could do such a thing.

And the polls have become better at predicting results since 1992.

[yurbud]

3. there are older ways of messing with vote counts than electronic machines

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. That's just what a government agent would say, if

she wanted to be accepted as a non-government agent. :evilgrin: