What if our polls got hacked...Not to be disparaging of pollsters.. that is a tough job in my opinion..BUT

[Peacetrain]

all of the current news about the Russians, Chinese and India also interfering with our elections.. would it be possible for a foreign actor or even a hacker from the US figure out a way to mess with polls..

Since nearly all of us are on cell phones now.. and I certainly do not get calls from pollsters anymore.. and as some in here have explained to me that a lot of this polling is online..would it be possible for some group to co-ordinate to impact polls in someway.. pretend that they are someone they are not etc etc..

What got me thinking about this is France.. their polls our polls everyone's polls show Le Pen winning and it went the other way.. they were shocked..

Would that not be the perfect way to interfere with an election..

I do not know if it is even possible..but when you think of where some of these hackers have been able to get into .. seems something like polling infor would be very easy to impact

[LonePirate]

1. There are many different polling organizations across many different states. They would need to hack all of them.

It is an absurd proposition to say that polls have been hacked. It's not much different than those who say the 2020 election was hacked.

[Prairie Gates]

2. Is this bargaining or denial?

[brooklynite]

3. Answer: no.

How do you imagine "they" access collected polling data while it's being tabulated and analyzed?

As for "the perfect way to interfere with an election.." I think you imagine polling data a lot more impact on undecided voters than it does.

[Fiendish Thingy]

4. You can't compare the US to France

Le Pen actually won the most votes, validating the polls, but she came in third in the number of seats won, because dozens of third place candidates dropped out before the runoff.

It was quite a demonstration of strategic unity that, unfortunately, is unlikely to work in the US.

[Metaphorical]

5. Is it possible? Yes. Is it likely? No.

Online polls are worthless, because there is no real way to secure them so that a person can only respond once (indeed, a common spoofing technique is to create bulk email accounts, register with them then capture any multi-factor authentication with bots tied to those accounts. More and more, cell-phone polls are going directly to spam, often without people even seeing them. Indeed, if my adult kids are any indication, they have mostly disabled their phones except for known calls, and use texting.

This means that surveys are tending to catch either older people with landlines (becoming rarer and rarer), or in-person interviews at malls (when was the last time you were in a mall?). It's not terribly surprising that the accuracy of such polls is becoming so bad - pollsters are, even with the best of intentions, increasingly polling a smaller and smaller slice of the electorate, one that general skews hard right.

As to hacking that data? Why bother? It's already skewed to the right, and there's always a chance that someone would have stored the data and checked it to make sure it hasn't been compromised.

The less reputable firms use push-polling to skew the outcome in a certain direction (and to subtly (or not so subtly) pressure the caller in certain ways).

[B.See]

6. Personally I don't respond to polls because

I have no idea who's doing the asking or why. Gotta wonder how many others are doing likewise.

[ucrdem]

7. Joe is rising steadily, and passed Trump nationally June 18.

per Marist. NBC polling shows Biden winning by 3 points in a 3-way race, unchanged for months. A recent US News poll of 34-and-under voters in 6 swing states plus Ohio shows Biden leading by 18% in a 2-way, 10% in a 3-way.

Why aren't CNN/NYT/MSNBC talking about these polls? Because they're not reporting the news, they're trying to make the news, and they're failing. They disrupt poorly.
..........
links: Marist:

https://maristpoll.marist.edu/polls/contest-for-president-still-up-for-grabs/

NBC:

In an expanded ballot including third-party candidates, Biden led by 3 points — again, nearly unchanged from April.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/poll-debate-aftermath-damages-biden-democratic-party-matchup-trump-unc-rcna161154

USNews:

https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2024-07-11/poll-rfk-jr-bests-trump-but-biden-suffers-more-in-a-wider-race

Updated to include links.

[pansypoo53219]

8. in the past i got push polled more osfthan by a real poll. i always knew because the pollsters had a hard time reading

the twisted verbage meant to make you want things thier way. i loved fucking those.2016 i got polled a lot by trumper ones. i need to answer the phone now. land line.