Can a poll be conducted over the Internet?
Some companies, especially Zogby, have begun pioneering with Internet polls, usually by asking people to sign up. Obviously the sample is anything but random. Also people can lie, but they can lie on telephone polls, too Careful normalization can remove the sampling bias. For example, if 80% of the respondents in an online poll are men and the customer wants an equal number of men and women, the pollster can simply treat each woman’s opinion as if four women said the same thing. Also, the online pollsters often poll the same people over and over, which has its advantages. For example, if a person has expressed strong approval for, say, George Bush five months in a row and now expresses strong disapproval, that represents a genuine shift. And, similar, to the robopollsters, every person gets precisely the same questions presented in precisely the same form, without any possible bias introduced by the interviewer.
