Shouldn we be exit polling Ohio now (say 4,000 – 5,000 voters) to get random, not clustered, exit poll data, accurate to .05%?
David, I don’t have my book here, but I think you need more than 25K persons to get +/-)0.5% at 95% CL, and even more if you want to be 99% confident of your results. To get +/- .05% would probably require a new election (hundreds of thousands), but I think that was a typo :-). Once you get around +/-1%, the number of samples required to tighten this confidence interval increases almost exponentially. That is why for cost reasons, most national polls do +/-3%. To get +/-2% requires almost 2X the samples. I wish I had my book here to be precise about all of this. I’ll try to report back later. Posted by: Rick Brady | Dec 21, 2004 8:49:02 PM Rick, I think a shorter answer to David’s “Shouldn’t we be exit polling Ohio now” is the next time we can do that is 4 years from now, no matter how much money we spend or how big the sample. It’s not an exit poll if it’s not a presidental election and people are exiting the polling place. Posted by: John Goodwin | Dec 21, 2004 9:37:12 PM John, I kno
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