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The study focuses on the accuracy of polls, not on their validity. My underlying premise is that the accuracy of most polls can't be proven. The value of this study is that these 20 polls were taken during a compressed period of time much closer to the election they were predicting than, say, polls that compare President Bush to a generic, unnamed Democrat more than a year out from the 2004 election. It's easier to evaluate these 20 polls for accuracy against the election as compared to presidential "approval ratings," for example. How can anyone prove their accuracy? Against what benchmark? Can't be done.

For a more in-depth answer to your query, look at the question: Do polls become more accurate closer to an election? The answer is that, in this study, they trended toward more accuracy closer to the election, but not strongly. Even at the end, only one poll got all five questions right within it's MOE.

you said
"The study focuses on the accuracy of polls, not on their validity. My underlying premise is that the accuracy of most polls can't be proven."

While I applaud your effort, your study is invalid. To do a valid study of your premise, you would have to study the results of polling in a few hundred elections, or at least a couple of dozen elections, not one.

Your study is an extreme case of cherry picking the data. I'm not alleging it was intentional, just that you happened to pick an election in which the unusual voter turnout almost guaranteed inaccurate polls.

Actually, to avoid any charges of cherry picking the data, you should really identify a couple of thousand elections for which you can get some polling data and the election results. Then let a computer program do a random drawing of the couple of hundred elections which will be your study sample. Only at this point, do you actually go out and collect the data. This way someone cannot accuse you of knowing which elections to include in the random drawing.

Since polls are entirely dependant on the demographic choices made by the pollsters, Obviously, in an election such as the recall, where a large percentage of first time voters cast ballots, the odds of the polls being wrong are greatly increased.

An interesting study would be to determine why the demographics of that one poll yielded good results. But, that would take inside information.