That is at odds with all other high-quality, large sample pre-election polling that a plausible explanation is required.
For a typical election sample of 1,000, the error rate is plus or minus three percentage points for each candidate, meaning that a 50-50 racoulduld actually differ by 53 to 47.
Recounting the ballots in three sample voting precincts, election officials in Miami-Dade County, the state's most populous county, found only a minor change in the count today and decided tonight not to proceed with a full recount of the county's ballots.
With such a small sample — only five election cycles for each party — and just a few pre-midterm polls available in each cycle before 2000, it could be risky to read too much into the pattern of Republican accuracy and Democratic inaccuracy in pre-midterm primary polls.
As Brooks said, "stuff happens" — not all the time, but more often than you might think on the basis of a sample of nine elections, going back to 1976, or, indeed, in a sample of nineteen elections, going back to 1935, when George Gallup invented his eponymous poll.
Referring to the Transparencia count, the State Department in Washington said today, "Reliable sampling of actual election returns revealed that no single candidate won an absolute majority and that there will be a runoff between President Alberto Fujimori and opposition candidate Alejandro Toledo".
For the 2001 UK general election, sampling veterans Coldcut sliced and diced speeches from several politicians in the style of Steinski and satirical cut-up duo Cassetteboy, turning them into dancefloor MCs.
In the analyses, the 'risk-time' for each person, i.e. the time from serum sampling until the election date, was used as the time variable.
Election pollsters sample only a minuscule portion of the electorate, not uncommonly something on the order of a couple of thousand people out of the more than two hundred million Americans who are eligible to vote.
The Sturgis review commissioned by the British Polling Council in the aftermath of the general election identified sampling as the biggest cause of the failure to predict the eventual result.
