WHO POLLS THE POLLSTERS?

Does it seem to anyone else but me that polls and pollsters have had an inordinately important place in this particular election? There are as many polls as opinions out there, and not surprisingly, every person I've spoken to about this issue has never been polled themselves. So, who are these pollsters, who are they polling, what are they doing to our democracy, and how can we find some way of dealing with their inaccuracies?

Just look at Pennsylvania for example. By the time we finished that election, there were polls ranging from everything like who drinks beer, to who hunts, to who said their last hail Mary, to how many people think Barack Obama should've played basketball to bowling, to the 13 percent of voters who said race played an important role in their choices. Now come on. Who is really going to admit to a pollster that they're racist, or misogynistic.

The fact is, polls hurt everyone in our democracy. In the founding fathers time there were no polls. The first presidential poll was taken in 1824, just as James Monroe was leaving the presidency, and Andrew Jackson, a decorated military hero was about to become president. But not until the advent of television, and more recently, 24 hour news cycle TV has the polling craze become not only trite, and inaccurate, but divisive, and undermining.

If pollsters and polls wanted to make sure they were not only fair, but accurate, then they should be as transparent as they expect their government to be. Biased pre-vote polling does more harm to the system than good, and as far the average American is concerned, all polling is biased as it is by nature a creator of false or misrepresented opinion. And we easily see what can happen when pollsters and conflicts of interest collide, as the case was with Mr. Penn and his embarrassing exit from the Clinton campaign.

it's like asking the wolves to watch over the sheep. How can we the American people feel like our best interests in choosing a candidate for president can be served by trusting voices on phones from organizations we've never heard of, sponsored by media conglomerates and news organizations looking for both credibility and ratings in a 24 hour news cycle world.

That's if we're polled at all. There are hundreds of millions of people in America, and I think to take a hundred or two hundred of them, ask a set of skewered and misleading questions, interpret the answers in ways that favor your constituency, does every American an injustice and a disservice. and not only that, in a 21st political economy, when every 8 year old has a cell phone, how do we accept as accurate polls that only service land-line based Americans.

I know polls are here to stay, and on some level they help candidates see who's out there, and where they might be leaning and what they might be thinking, but the operative word there is "Might". We humans are a fickle bunch, and some of us will vote against a black man, or a woman, or an older man, because we feel compelled to, not because we're told to by some nameless faceless possibly fictitious people. We change our minds a lot, even up until the time we're getting ready to pull a voting lever. We don't need hundreds of pollsters making millions of dollars a year off of our thoughtful indecisions.

Polls can never account for the individual desire to make a decision without being pressured. That's when we humans make our best decisions. Those people that are deciding their votes based on polls deserve the presidents they get from misleading pollsters. Unfortunately those of us who believe in the independent spirit of the ability to change your government, as idealistic as that may sound, are never the ones polled.

So all you erstwhile pollsters out there beware. You're not seeing the big picture, and you're not really aware of what a majority of us think. And that makes you endangered species. Maybe we need a poll on that.