Charlie Mattingly

11/9/10

Math 115 for Liberal Arts

Dr. Andy Long, Instructor

Election Day, November 2, 2010! Time and place: 11:00 A.M. at the Rising Sun Senior Building. The race for Indiana Senate seat is under way! The contenders are Republican Dan Coats and Democrat Brad Ellsworth. All the campaigning up to this day has come full circle, and with it only one winner will take Senate Seat. Republican Dan Coats won, as we know now, but this is how my half an hour of exit polling went.

My precinct is Precinct 4, Randolph Township in Rising Sun, Ohio County, Indiana. Since my home town is small everybody in the county (which is the smallest in the state) every voter votes in the same place, the Rising Sun Senior Building. I went to vote at about 10:45 and immediately afterwards went back to my car and gathered my Exit Poll script and ballot bow, which was a manila envelope. My exit polling began at precisely 11:00 AM, and this is how it went.

As I began to perform my Exit Poll for Indiana Senate Seat, I noticed a few things that would hamper my collecting. (1) An absence of people and (2) The best available location to take exit polls was occupied by two people “hollering” to voters coming in to vote for Judd McMillan, a District Representative. So I as I posted up to perform my duty, and tried my best to do so. What was funny is that there were a lot of cars in the parking lot, and I thought it would have been a snap to collect a lot of data, but that wasn’t so. There were a lot of cars because on Tuesdays in Rising Sun, the Senior Center has senior lunch and activities, which starts at 10:30 AM! So at the same time I was voting and collecting exit polls, a huge amount of people were having lunch, in the same building.

And since I couldn’t take an exit poll in the same place as the voting was, I could not take exit polls in the Senior Center. Anyhow I collected a total of 14 votes in a half hour.

3 votes for Brad Ellsworth (Dem)

11 votes for Dan Coats (Rep)

I was turned down about 14 times as well! A few people told me to, “Get out of my face”, “No thanks”, and even one person said, “NKU is not even a real school!” So from my experience in exit polling for the 2010 Election was about half and half; 14 votes collected and 14 exit poll denials. One other problem was my cameras batteries were almost dead and nobody wanted to take my picture, so my photo is not the greatest. Overall it was a neat experience. At least the weather was nice. Again the winner for Indiana Senate Seat for the whole state was Dan Coats, Republican.

Total Stats Taken in Exit Polling-total 14 votes, 14 denials

3 votes Brad Ellsworth (Dem)

11 votes Dan Coats (Republican)