Cell-phone-only users, comprising 4-7 percent of the population, are creating potential problems for polling organizations seeking to get a handle on the various voting blocks in America. The rising demographic of cell-phone-only users consists primarily of 18-24 year-olds, who historically have the lowest voter turnout during elections. But that is all changing; with more young voters registered than ever before, pollsters are frustrated by the technical and legal limitations in accessing the cell-phone-only block of voters.

“Legal restrictions are preventing political pollsters from reaching millions of Americans this election cycle because they rely exclusively on cell phones,” The Hill reported. “The inability to reach such voters, mainly young people, is contributing to the growing perception that phone surveys are skewed and inaccurate and should become a thing of the past.”

Michael Brick, a survey methods specialist at Westat, a research firm in Rockville, Md., told the Associated Press that pollsters are not concerned with the issue so much for this year as for future election years, when the demographic will have increased dramatically. “This may be the last round of presidential elections before it does have an effect,” he said.

Known wireless prefixes and blocks of numbers used for wireless phones are removed from samples used in random-digit dialing, and pollsters can be fined for using automated dialing equipment to call wireless numbers.

As an independent political analyst, Jon Delano spends more time than most looking at polls and tends to be a skeptic when it comes to poll numbers.

“After all, it’s hard to believe that a few hundred citizens can really reflect the sentiments of hundreds of thousands of voters,” he said in a Pittsburgh Business Times article printed during the 2000 elections.

Political analyst Philip J. Trounstine points out that in a poll of 1,000 respondents, probability theory dictates that the poll results can be as much as 3 percentage points in either direction – called the margin of error.

“So when Gallup reports that the race is at 49 percent for Kerry and 48 percent for Bush, the results could actually be 46 percent Kerry to 51 percent Bush, or they could be 52 percent Kerry to 45 percent Bush,” he writes. “Or somewhere between. And right now, virtually all the polls are within the margin of error.”

Like most things, the quality of polls varies widely, and there is a never-ending debate among polling professionals about what is the best poll to conduct, Delano said.

For the last five decades, the telephone has been the key instrument for contacting citizens. Now, however, message machines often keep potential respondents from picking up their phone, and many voters have unlisted phone numbers.

A valid telephone poll consists of anywhere from 400 to 1,000 interviews, but as many as eight out of 10 people who answer their phones refuse to take the time to be interviewed. The problem has been so significant that pollsters held a conference called the International Conference on Survey Non-Response in 1999.

To solve the myriad problems communications technology and the laws developed to govern it create, pollsters might eventually have to move to other techniques that use combinations of random-digit dialing and the Internet, though Internet polling is questionable since respondents are self-selected, Delano wrote.

Most in the business agree the cell-phone-only phenomenon will eventually affect telephone polling.

“For politicians, of course, the key is to poll people who actually plan to vote in the upcoming election. Nobody else counts. With so many citizens opting out of the democratic process, finding real voters has gotten tougher,” Delano warned.