Someone such as Elon needs to start an Amber Alert voting system! Only people 18 yrs and older that pay taxes should have the right to vote. These poles done by NBC, ABC and even Fox are useless. Lets set up a text mass voting system for all tax paying citizens. There has got to be a way to make it legal and legitimate. It doesn’t mean it has to be followed but at least Trump will hear the American people speak there opinion. I find myself in the Red side of the isle but I don’t agree with everything from the Right. Such as, I believe fully in her body her choice or his body his choice for that matter!!!
What you are proposing is moving from a Representative Republic (where we the people elect those who are to represent us in Congress, and those Representatives then present and vote on policies that serve our interests) to a Democracy (where we the people can directly vote on policies that serve our interests).
This is exactly why abolishing the Electoral College (and use the popular vote to elect the President) is a bad thing as well. There are large groups of people who share similar interests in certain parts of the country, and those areas could dictate through their votes how the rest of the country is run. A democracy in those cases turns into a “mob-ocracy” where the mob rules, and we both agree that wouldn’t be good for the health of the country.
We’ve seen how bad California has become, well part of it is because of the ballot initiative process - the problem is so bad that the Governor and Legislature in the state only control a fraction of the state’s budget, the rest is automatically allocated to voter passed initiatives.
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Michael, I see your point. I meant more of a polling system then. I don’t know how many polls are out there and how many people are in each poll. Do you know anyone that is on the polling systems on all the news channels? I do not know anyone that contributes to the polls done on ABC, NBC, Fox ect…
I’m confused about what this proposal is actually for.
Most of the polls you see mentioned on the news is usually performed by a polling agency with the financial backing of the news outlet (although some, like CNN and CBS do have their own polling units). But they are also a “garbage in-garbage out” poll, because some of the polling agencies “weight” the polls in a bias (typically that is similar to the demographic of the news outlet’s viewers, instead of a ratio similar to the electorate of the county). That’s why it’s best to see the underlying data (the stuff the news outlet won’t share on air, but you can sometimes find that shows the demographics of the sample).
I tend to look at Real Clear Politics (and their sub-site Real Clear Polling), they collect a lot of the polls, and you can drill down into the data.
If we look at their site today, they have the Presidential Approval Rating (many of the polls will update this poll daily) and they also average based on a number of polls.
If I look at one of the more reliable and non-biased polls, Rasmussen Reports samples 1500 “Likely Voters” (registered voters that are likely to vote) from all across the country. Likely Voters (abbreviated on Real Clear as “LV”) tends to be more accurate than just “Registered Voters” or “RV” or miles more accurate than just “Adults” or “A”.
Sadly, the public polls keep their sample size to a few thousand at best (obviously for time and cost concerns)- the bigger the sample size the more accurate the poll gets. Political Campaigns will pay big bucks to get sample sizes in the 10’s of thousands, but that data is never made public.
It used to be that the pollsters only called land line telephones, and obviously with the reduction in the number of people with land lines, that’s getting harder to achieve, plus maintain a good mix (Democrat vs. Republican vs. Independent) in their poll.
It’s for the same reasons you won’t see a poll on issues that carries any weight - the sample size is too small to be more than 80-85% accurate (if that high), the powers that be in Congress are not going to spend campaign level funds for issue polling with a higher accuracy, and clearly the news media doesn’t want to poll a hot-button issue if it doesn’t fit their agenda.
Thanks for all this information Michael. People need to start using common sense with facts and stop letting the media brain wash!! God bless our country!