Re:One pollster’s explanation for why the polls got it wrong
by esoterica on Wednesday November 11, 2020 @02:51AM
(#25056363)
The problem with polls is that there is substantial bias introduced by the fact that only a particular type of person volunteers to participate in polls, not because people are lying to pollsters because they are afraid of their identity being tied to their answers. Anonymizing the polls will not fix partisan non-response bias.
You pick a random piece of paper from a stack, check some boxes, put the paper into an opaque box with all other papers. This makes tracking the paper back to you impractical, if not impossible.
This is, of course, not achievable by phone calls, and also hardly achievable over the internet (only maybe using Tor). This also may make it harder to control for age, gender, race, etc.
Otherwise, expressing any opinion (even the most orthodox at the time of the poll) may potentially be turned against you, and there is no obvious personal benefit for most people in expressing their opinion to strangers.