Mobile phone use may have excluded voice of young voters

THE growth in mobile phone use could have excluded large numbers of young, newly-registered voters from the opinion polls in the run-up to the presidential elections.

With the polls continuing to run extremely close, some commentators have suggested the slight lead enjoyed by George Bush nationally may not be an accurate reflection of voter intentions.

A growing number of people rely solely on mobile phones to make and take calls, putting them out of reach of polling organisations trying to get a fix on the United States electorate who can contact voters only by landlines.

Researchers insist that the majority of people who rely solely on their mobile phones tend to be young and mobile - a demographic least likely to vote in the polls.

Yet with reports of unprecedented voter registration, many young voters could be flying under the pollsters’ radar.

“Pollsters don’t think the cell phone issue will affect them this year, but they are worried about it,” said Michael Brick, a survey methods specialist at Westat, a research firm in Rockville, Maryland. “This may be the last round of presidential elections before it does have an effect.”

When tracking this year’s election, pollsters contact people on traditional phones. About 5% of all households receive telephone service only by mobile phone, according to a face-to-face survey done earlier this year by the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labour Statistics.

The percentage approaches 12% among all people under 35 and rises to 14% among 18-24-year-olds. Cell numbers aren’t listed in phone directories, and even if they were, pollsters are not allowed to call them.

“Many of these people are not voters,” said Linda Piekarski, vice-president of database and research at Survey Sampling International, which provides samples for the research industry.

“They’ve always been hard to get into our polls anyway. They tend to be non-responsive.”

Survey researchers have much more to learn about this group, however, especially its demographic and political inclinations.

There have been difficulties since the American political poll was born in Pennsylvania, in 1824, when a Harrisburg newspaper tried to predict the presidential election.

Straw ballots, which newspaper readers were asked to fill out and mail in, were unreliable. Canvass polls, where workers were sent to polling precincts, were marginally better.

It wasn’t until the 1930s that scientific “sampling” - the process of finding groups of random individuals who mirror the demographic characteristics of a given population - became the method of choice.

Since then, the pollster’s top challenge has been finding an accurate sample population, then getting in touch with those most likely to vote.

Since World War II, the telephone has been the primary tool for conducting scientific surveys, but as the Chicago Tribune discovered, when it relied on poll results to craft its 1948 “Dewey Beats Truman” story, calling people on the phone has its limitations.

It turned out that people without telephones who couldn’t be contacted had different voting patterns than people who had phones. Could the same eventually prove true of the cell-phone-only crowd?

“I don’t think any of us know the answer to that,” said Carroll Doherty, editor of The Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press.