American and Croatian Excuses

Executives of GFK and PULS – two agencies that embarrassed themselves with the Croatian presidential election exit polls – can comfort themselves with their American colleagues being affected by the same sort of predicament few months ago.

However, unlike them, American polling agencies have decided to actually conduct survey and see what had gone wrong with their exit polls. The results of the survey indicate the young of age of interviewers being one of the most important reasons for discrepancy between the exit polls and actual votes. Younger interviewers tended to attract disproportionate number of younger interviewees who disproportionately tended to vote Kerry.

GFK and PULS, while trying to explain what went wrong with their exit polls, also tended to put the blame on older and less educated voters who weren't likely to respond to interviewers. But their statements don't point to the age of their interviewers and the way they could affect the exit poll results.

Apart from dead women in Herzegovina, of course.