Those Cheating Pollsters

Cheat-Seeking Missiles found a cheater this morning. It took about 90 seconds.

I saw the AP Headline, Poll: Americans Want Warrants for Spying, and read the lead:

WASHINGTON - A majority of Americans want the Bush administration to get court approval before eavesdropping on people inside the United States, even if those calls might involve suspected terrorists, an AP-Ipsos poll shows.

Scrolling to the bottom, I found the link to the AP/Ipsos poll site, and two clicks later, I had the topline results of the poll in front of me. Scrolling all the way down to question number two, I found who they talked to:

Republicans: 40%
Democrats: 52%

It gets worse. Only 13% identified themselves as "strong Republicans" while 20% self-claimed "strong Democrat" status.

With the poll coming in at a slight 56% in support of warrants and a margin of error of up to 3.4 percent, it is obvious that the poll tells us nothing about America's true opinion about warrantless electronic domestic searches of people who talk to terrorists.

The big question itself is pretty straightforward, but hides some bias:

Should the Bush administration be required to get a warrant from a judge before monitoring phone and internet conversations between American citizens in the United States and terror suspects, or should the government be allowed to monitor such communications without a warrant?

The question could have been more fair in three ways:

• It should have said the terror suspects were not in the United States.
• The reference to the Bush administration, while defensible, ignores the fact that Democratic administrations have claimed the same right. The question would have been more fair if it used "federal government" or "federal agents" instead.
• We know the program is extremely limited, but the question does not communicate that. Rephrase the end of the question, "... or should the government occasionally be allowed ...," and you'd get a different result.

Not asked in the survey -- of course not, since AP's doing it -- is a question about the press' responsibility in these situations during a time of war. But given how this survey was structured, the results would have been meaningless, anyway.