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To: Alberta's Child
That's a misunderstanding. Properly used, "weighting" does refer to something the pollster does. It can only be wrong if they do it in the first place.

If your random sample produces results that are obviously wrong, like a 95% female breakdown, that means your sample was flawed. Probably it was too small. You can't correct that by weighting other factors. If the sample was so unreliable in that one metric there's no reason to think any of the others would be valid. You needed a bigger sample.

A poll can certainly be designed to use weighting, and some are. But many of these political polls are simply reporting the party ID results that they collected. They aren't weighted for them and can't be jiggled by adjusting that.

51 posted on 11/02/2016 10:53:12 AM PDT by mlo
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To: mlo

Rasmussen has said women answer the phone 5X more often than men and this has to be weighted away for legitimate measure.


55 posted on 11/02/2016 10:58:24 AM PDT by Owen
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