Mobile phones and their effect on the US elections

You wouldn't think we would mention the US elections on a site devoted to mobile devices, but there's an interesting and fast-growing phenomenon known as the "cellphone effect" which is potentially throwing polls off by several percentage points, reported over on the excellent fivethirtyeight.com. Essentially it boils down to this: some polling companies have a tendency to only interview people through their landline phones, so anyone without a landline simply isn't represented in their surveys. That means politicians with strong support among mobile-only households would do much better on election days than landline-only polls predict.

Published by Tzer2 at 0:29 UTC, November 4th

Categories: Miscellaneous, Links of Interest
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News Discussion

Tzer2

Comment: Incidentally, this effect seems to be particularly pronounced in this election, partly because mobile phone ownership is higher now than in 2004 and partly because more people are going mobile-only.

As one of the comments noted in the link's article, the polling companies have to give up this landline obsession. By 2012 the percentage of mobile-only voters will be much higher than now.

viipottaja

Comment: Yeah, I read about this before and apparently this is thought to likely help Democrats (i.e. they should do a bit better than the traditional polls show). Hopefully this means that Obama will win with an even bigger margin than most polls show.. :) Altough, I suspect the "Bradley effect" and this will cancel each other out.

I live in Washington DC and there is a clear sense of anticipation in the air. Champange, I hope, will be in order tonight!

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