Election opinion polls missing out on the mobile revolution

Cringely has come out with a insightful article on how opinion polls are missing out on the mobile phone revolution in US. This is even more relevant to Indians.

According to Cringely, most of the opinion polls are conducted over telephone. I am not sure how many exit polls are conducted at the voting booths in India, so I can vaguely assume that this holds partly for India too.

The problem is that lesser and lesser mobile younger people/college-students/ are taking landline connections because of all the installation hassle, as well as the perennial problem that these group of people are unlikely to be found at home for anything but sleeping or studying. ;) Most of them have instead got a mobile phone.

Since calling up mobile phones for these purposes is far too sensitive an issue (and apparently not allowed in the states), this whole mobile phone wielding population is being missed out in the polls. And this is most of the younger generation!!!

Now take note of the fact that the number of mobile users in the metropolises of India have already started exceeding landline users, and it seems that telephone based polls are going to be lesser and lesser representative of the actual population.

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