Adam Lotscher

Mat 115- 007

Voting Day Survey

Arriving at the church where I vote I took my picture then went in to vote myself. After that I walked back to my car to grab the pillow case I used for voters to place there slip into and the slips themselves. I live in Ohio and the two candidates were Rob Portman and Lee Fisher. Since I arrived at the church there was a man outside handing out Republican example ballots and a older man and his wife supporting a particular issue on the ballot. The one handing out Republican example ballots voted in Kentucky but the other two voted for Ohio senate so they both took the survey. I started surveying voters at around 2:45 on Tuesday and stayed for a little over half an hour because I had only gotten 14 voters to survey. I don't think I had any voters deny me in my survey but one or two seemed to have rushed out before I felt I could politely ask them for their survey so they got away. Many It seemed that before three o'clock most of the survey results came in.

The exit and entrance were the same so I know that I saw all of the traffic in and out of the church. I was told that I had actually just missed the bulk of voters at the church.

I was interested in seeing how close my results were to the actual outcome of the Ohio senate vote. I counted 10 of 14 votes were for Rob Portman and 4 of 14 votes were for Lee Fisher. The final count showed 57.6% votes were for Portman and 39% were for Lee Fisher. I’m not exactly sure what sense it makes to have two percentages that don't even add up to 100 but I guess well just add that to the huge list of things about voting no one understands.

4 of 14 brings about 28% of my survey votes were for Lee Fisher which leaves about 72% for Rob Portman. This seems to be a fairly good rough estimate of the actual vote count. In class, Mr Long had said that 30 seems to be the minimum number of results for surveying and statistically predicting outcomes. Since I only had 14 which is not even half of that I didn't expect to even close. Saying that, I think my results are pretty good.