A new study “makes a startling suggestion about so-called ‘robo-polls’ in the 2012 Republican presidential primaries, raising the question of whether these automated surveys may have been adjusted to match live-interviewer polls,” Gary Langer reports.
Key excerpt: “There is no difference in the accuracy of IVR polls and human polls when IVR polls occur after a human poll, but IVR polls do significantly worse if human polls are not conducted first. The apparent equivalence of IVR polls and human polls in the 2012 Republican primary appears to depend on human polls being conducted prior to the IVR polls.”
That said, the authors admit they “did not test the reverse
possibility, that traditional polls were altered to match automated
ones.”
