Reply #37: Pre-election polls are meaningless compared to exit polls [View All]

[Time for change]

The exit polls indicated a clear Kerry win.

Pre-election polls have numerous problems that exit polls don't have. For example:

How do you get a representative sample? (e.g., people who use primarily cell phones would be greatly undersampled)

How do you weight the likelihood that a person will vote? (Obviously this is no problem whatsoever in an exit poll)

How a person thinks they will vote prior to the election frequently changes by election day (again, no problem with an exit poll).