How much do these stations pay for these polls?
In my past experience, a decent poll with a MoE of about 4 or 5 will run you $2,000 if done by live, non-accented operators. SUSA's costs may be lower, because they use automated response. Basically...it's not expensive to do.
I can make a call a minute, or 180 calls in three hours between 5:30 pm and 8:30 pm, or 540 calls over three nights. Assuming a 20% response rate, six people can make enough calls. Assuming a payment rate of $10 an hour over 5 people over 9 hours each, that is $450. I can fit all of them into the basement of my house. So what is to stop me from picking 3,240 random names out of the White pages for a particular locality, and spend $450 to conduct my own poll?
Or rather, what is to stop the Atlas forum from collectively conducting a poll? If we had 20 volunteers, each would only need to make (600 x 5 / 20) = 150 calls, which can be made in the space of three hours. All we would need is for one person to cut the list. Then there is a simple formula to calculate margin of error. If our poll comes out as better than a reputable pollster, we have just established ourselves, gentlemen!
There's nothing to stop you (us?) persay, but there is more to polling than just asking questions. It is almost a science to properly rotate questions and ask them in the right order, and it crucial to find people who have no attachment to the results of the poll reading the choices to the people. Bias is really easy to pollute a poll, and it takes a good pollster to filter that stuff out best as possible.
