UMaine Professor, Students Help with Election Day Polling
Contact: George Manlove at (207) 581-3756
ORONO — Amid the flurry of excitement and activity as Mainers flock to the polls to settle state referendum questions and a presidential election on Nov. 2 will be a group of University of Maine political science students helping with exit polls for state and national polling services.
UMaine Political Science Prof. Amy Fried again has recruited nearly a dozen of the students in her American Public Opinion class to interview voters as they exit polling stations in area precincts throughout the day on Tuesday.
Some will be volunteering for journalist Mal Leary of Capitol News Service in Augusta and Christian Potholm, a Bowdoin College professor and a political consultant seasoned in public opinion polling. They’ll collect voter opinions on the Palesky tax cap and bear-baiting referenda, and on state ballot questions.
Other students will gather information and opinions about Congressional and presidential elections for Edison-Mitofsky pollsters, who compile information used by the networks CNN, Fox and Associated Press.
Fried says students can learn about the political process through their experiences interviewing voters leaving polling stations. It helps cement what they learn from classes, according to Fried, and it helps polling companies gather reliable information.
Exit polling at elections are critical for university researchers like Fried, Potholm and others in political science fields to know how voters make decisions, in addition to when they make them and what personal information may be of interest to analysts.
It will be useful to know, for instance, says Leary, whether people voting on the Palesky one percent property tax cap own or rent their homes. Renters may be less interested than home owners in property tax issues.
Exit polling involves a list of questions designed to generate enough information to provide explanations of voting results, yet not consume too much polling time. Exit-poll volunteers will approach voters at random, usually every third or fifth voter, and will call in results on a periodic basis throughout the day.
News organizations, Leary adds, are hungry for exit poll results and are the basis for major news networks’ predictions of outcomes. “I’m in it because I want to write the story in the morning,” says Leary, who supplies Capitol News Service articles and broadcasts to the Bangor Daily News, the Lewiston Sun-Journal and radio stations throughout Maine.
“From an academician’s point of view, they are saying we’d like to do what we like to do, which is analyze the data,” he says. Leary and Potholm often collaborate during elections.
The UMaine students will join more than 100 other college students around Maine, including all of the University of Maine System campuses, some community colleges and Bates, Bowdoin and Colby colleges, plus high schools in areas where there are no colleges.
In addition to asking about voter choices, the student pollsters also will gather demographic information, including age, political affiliation, gender and occupation.
Fried believes that, on the whole, voters are truthful with pollsters. As part of her public opinion class requirements, Fried is requiring the students to write papers about their polling experiences.