What polls do not rely on land lines?

Who has a landline? Seriously. Does VOIP count as a landline?

Sometimes polls are taken in malls, or outside movie theaters.
You won’t hear things like “65% of the people who saw ‘Frankenweenie’ are voting for Romney”, but that is a source they use.

ICRSurvey may be one. I don’t know how reliable the company is. All I can tell you is a rep. contacted me on my cell phone number.

STR Global is another. It is an independent company who gathers data on hotel stays. While some surveys are mailed via snail-mail, most are now sent electronically to an e-mail address listed on the reservation record.

The Gallup Organization uses both landline and cell phones for their polls.

When I read about polling at 538 and at real clear politics and and at Huffington Post, they keep on mentioning which polls are done with landline only and which ones include mobile phones. I forget which ones they are,but if you got to those sites, you can get information about it. All of those sites also use a method that averages all the polls in order to make their estimates.

I work at a call center that polls registered voters. The phone numbers we call are the ones the people registered with, so we actually call a ton of cell phones. There is definitely a difference though when it comes to age. The older the person, the more likely they are to answer and do the survey, whether or not it’s a land line.

@tom_g What is VOIP?

@JLeslie – Voice over IP (It’s actually VoIP, not VOIP – my bad).

@tom_g I guess that is what I have? I get my “landline” through Comcast cable company. That is a landline to me, and I think most people. Basically if it plugs into a wall I consider it a landline. Even though when the electricity or cable goes out my phone goes out, where if it only worked on the phone lines I would still have my phone.

I do get calls on my “landline” to be polled and calls from one of my senators to participate on audio town hall meeting, basically a conference or bridge call, where we can actually ask questions. As a side note to that I am a registered democrat and the senator is a republican. I have never had a polling call on my cell. I live in TN, but my cell is Palm Beach County FL.

On the Pennsylvania voter registration form, the phone number is optional. Any polling that uses those numbers is going to be biased due to some people deciding not to put down a number, in addition to all the other reasons why people who refuse to do polls bias a sample.

@wundayatta Interesting. I have no recollection of putting a phone number on the form, but I very well might have. I had figured it was random dialing for polling and not taken from a list. It makes sense it would be registered voters they would want to target for obvious reasons.