Pertanyaan

Jakarta, Wed. Many people are closely following the political polls during the final weeks preceding this important general election. But how do these polls actually work? “Polls are surveys of a relatively small number of people compared to the actual number who will vote. They are to predict who may actually win an election before the final vote,” said a politics observer, Muhammad Faishal. Let’s say that 100 million people are expected to vote in the general election. If 100 people are asked for their opinions, each respondent represents a million voters. Faishal emphasized further, “ It is obvious, the result of such a poll are not very reliable. The more people surveyed, the more, meaningful are the results”. Pollsters have various ways of making their polls more accurate. They try to find a representative of variety of people to question. For example, they look for people with similar backgrounds and from similar regions to those of all voters. Pollsters also ask questions that try to find how many people who support each candidate will actually vote. If a candidate has a higher percentage of enthusiastic supporters than his opponent, he has a better chance of winning than the low numbers might suggest. Pollsters may only count those who they consider to be “likely voters”. If we look at the polls that are taken over time, we can often detect a trend. We can tell if a candidate is gaining or losing support when we compare with the most recent polls to the earlier ones. Polls often ask potential (those who could be) voters what they like or dislike about each candidate . the campaigns use those results to help them decide which issues to stress pr which positions to clarify. They can also determine which voters to target with their massages. “Because no two people are the same, polls can never be perfect predictors of the real vote. But they can give important clues as to where things may be heading. At the very least, if you like politics, polls can be great entertainment,“ Faishal said. (the news) We can infer from the text that ….