Polls Are Everywhere in Texas' Final Week. Here Is How to Tell a Real One From a Fake
After a poll in another race was revealed as allegedly fake, a UTSA researcher is explaining what voters should check — and the checklist is simple: who paid, who was asked, how many answered, and what the margin of error actually means.
Texas voters are being flooded with polls in the final week of the Senate and governor's races — this station has reported several — and not every number deserves trust. KSAT's voter explainer, listed among the station's top stories this week and read this run, puts the local peg plainly: political polls are everywhere, and after last week's revelation that one of them was fake, allegedly a social experiment, voters may be wondering how to tell which numbers to trust. A UTSA researcher explains how in that piece.
The checklist from a veteran pollster, published by the Public Policy Institute of California and read in full this run, starts with transparency. A legitimate poll discloses the basics from the beginning — who conducted it, when the survey was conducted, how many people responded, and who those people are — and a real polling organization makes its contact information, history and leadership easy to find. The findings should state the sample size, where and when the questions were put in the field, and the margin of sampling error, with a detailed methodology behind them: how people were contacted, how the sample was weighted, and how the questions were worded.
Two more checks matter in a week of dueling internal polls. Sample composition beats sample size alone — a poll whose respondents do not represent the electorate will skew unless it is weighted — and independence matters: a credible survey lists its sponsors and funders, and a poll released by a campaign or a partisan group should get extra scrutiny of its questions and results. Early voting in Bexar County runs through Friday, Oct. 30, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 3.
