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US Election Series: Is Trump’s accusation of rigged polls true?

Donald Trump has accused in the past and continues to say that the system is rigged. He mentioned voter fraud but largely what he said is that the System is rigged because Hillary Clinton, despite all her corruption is even allowed to run and because the media focuses less on the revelations of the level of corruption (Wikileaks, FBI), and because the polls are rigged to show leads for Hillary Clinton.

It was revealed through the hacked emails of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager that lots of media personalities colluded with the Clinton campaign in fabricating stories, the justice department colluded with Clinton campaign to hinder investigations against her. It was also revealed that John Podesta asking the pollsters to oversample Democrats to show her leading, a voter suppression technique.

Hence, we investigate, if any of this could be true by going through the methodology of the polls.

Most of the times and the majority of the people focus on the poll numbers, not on the methodology. When we went through several of the methodology documents, we did find evidence of oversampling. In areas like California, in some cases, the Democrats are more in the sample, sometimes by double-digit. It still understandable because the number of Democrats in the region outnumbers registered Republicans. But in states like Pennsylvania, it is not necessary because it’s a swing state.

In Monmouth University polling, which was done between 29th of October and 1st of November, it showed that Hillary Clinton is leading Donald Trump by four points in Pennsylvania. They sampled, 403 people, of which 31 percent are Republicans, 27 percent are Independents and 42 percent Democrats. Based on their own calculations, 93 percent of the Republicans support Trump and 44 percent of the Independents support Trump. So, if the sample is tilted to equal, say 33 Republicans, 33 Democrats and 34 independents, then Trump is leading by almost 4 points.

This has been one of the reason, or research is calling for a landslide victory for Trump.

 

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