"Who did you vote for President in 2008?
Obama: 47%
McCain: 46%"
Are people lying or is it a bad sample or both?
People lie all the time on questions like that. Six months into 1993, the %age of people who admitted in polls that they voted for Bill Clinton was notably down from the real #, because he was unpopular. When the president is unpopular, people don't admit to voting for him, even in an anonymous poll.
Exhibit A: My mother claims to have voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. I could have sworn she voted for George Bush at the time.
Well, it's easy for people who did vote in the past to not get polled (died, not likely voter, and so on). Of course some people lie. The 2004 exit poll had 43% who claimed they voted for Bush in 2000 (versus 37% for Gore). That's 52.5 million out of the 122 million 2004 voters. Bush only got 50.5 in 2000. Assuming that every single Bush 2000 voter voted in 2004, it shouldn't have been more than 41.5%.
