The Madison Pagan Press Survey FAQ

Below are some commonly asked questions about this survey.

So, what's this?

It's a poll for United States citizens, timed to coincide with the upcoming US Presidential Election in November. (We didn't make that clear enough early on. This is our attempt to clearly state that this is intended for the US elections. We are sincerely sorry for those of us who thought it was globally intended. It makes it plain that perhaps there should be another survey in the future that covers the world. We'll work on it.)

It's a list of which current "hot button" issues to find out which ones are important to you.

What's it supposed to prove?

Not much. Just trying to get an idea of:

How many of us are out there
Whether we intend to vote in the next US election.
What we think about current events

Who are you guys?

Cathy, Dale, and Dan. Dale and Cathy came up with the idea, and asked Dan if he could make it work. Dan is hosting the survey and trying to keep it working.

What are you going to do with what you get?

Tell everybody what we found out. We'll run some totals and see if we come up with any interesting trends and post them here. In addition, we'll provide the final data file (or files, if it turns out to be really big) to whoever wants it to run some of their own datamining tests.

Note that there are also hard copies of this survey running around. We'll have to incorporate those results with what we get from this web version.

Come on. Isn't this kind of stupid? People are going to just vote over and over.

Well, they can't vote again just by hitting the reload button. Dan's taken care to make sure that can't happen. Go ahead, try it. :-) They can fill the form out over and over again if they want, but that takes time. Our experience is that cheaters usually don't like to work at it and the reward factor for cheating in this case is pretty low. We also believe that, if we get enough respondents, the cheaters will show up as near-duplicates. We're checking time of entry and a few other things. We think we can catch most of the ones that aren't supposed to be there.

So what do we have so far?

Sorry, there won't be any reports of current results. We'll release the totals and as much breadkdown as we can sometime before the elections but we think that announcing anything before that would affect future polling.