15 October 2004
Gerry Rising
What the polls may not reflect
An episode yesterday makes me believe that the polls may be as far off this year as they were back in 1936 and 1948 when they predicted "easy" elections of Alf Landon and Thomas E. Dewey.
First some background: My wife has not voted for a number of years. (Her reasoning was suspect: an avid reader and TV watcher of crime dramas, she was afraid that she would be called for jury duty. It didn't work; she was called nonetheless.) Finally, however, this year she saw enough of current history to agree to register and vote against the federal incumbent. We obtained the forms and submitted them to the Erie County Board of Elections several weeks ago.
Having heard nothing, I called the Board yesterday to determine the status of my wife's application. When I provided my wife's name and our address, I was told that Doris was not yet registered.
"Is there a problem?" I asked.
"No, indeed," I was told, "We have about ten thousand new registration documents still to process. Your wife's form is certainly among them."
"Will you be able to get to them before the election?" was my concerned response.
"Yes," I was assured, "we foresee no problem."
I'm old enough to recall the Roosevelt-Landon fiasco. It turned out that at that time the polling was done by telephone and proportionally fewer Democrats had phones, thus the projections were wildly skewed.
A related problem may apply this time. I don't know who those new voters are, although I would like to think that a strong proportion of them are angered by the current administration's history. I also suspect that many of them are young people who will vote for the first time.
Whoever they are, if the Erie County situation is at all representative, we may have a major "shift" between what we are told on November 1 and what we learn on November 2.Copyright 2004 by Buffalo Report, Inc.