Cell Phones and Polls

One more day to go until the election that people around the world are watching. I have been posting lightly down the stretch. I've been almost too wired, searching for the latest info, about this election to take the time to post. However, this one regards a great little analysis form Nate Silver, a baseball sabermetrician (their term for baseball statisticians) who has been applying his statistical methods to the election polls. His conclusion regarding use of cell phones exclusively by many these day -- it's distorting the polls by around 4%. Check it out.

The polls in the Cingular-y orange color include cellphones in their samples; the polls in gray do not. The cellphone polls have Obama ahead by an average of 9.4 points; the landline-only polls, 5.1 points.