On Thu, 11 Nov 2004, Richard Hoffbeck wrote: > A couple of things to keep in mind about exit polls, or at least the ones > that were leaked. The first is that they are fairly shallow samples. With a > national sample size of 12,000 you're talking about an average of 240 > individuals per state which is about 1/4 the normal sample size used for > political polls. The national sample was 13,660, but the state samples were not 240 - they were more like 2,500 for some states and 1,500 or more for most others. I looked at the numbers on the CNN.com site: http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html Florida: 2,862 Iowa: 2,512 Ohio: 2,020 New Mexico: 2,006 > Second, early results are going to be heavily biased towards the > individuals who vote early. That may or may not be a problem depending > on whether those people are representative of the overall population. In > this case they were heavily weighted towards Democratic women, who as a > group, tended to vote more heavily towards Kerry. This seems to be correct. It is certainly true that the early numbers favored Kerry, but the final numbers were spot on the official counts. Mike _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list