History of opinion polls: the individual votes

An interesting chapter in the history of what opinion polls are the "special votes". These consisted of a sort of simulacrum of elections conducted in order to obtain in advance, or before election day, data about what would happen. The dream of prophecy.
It must be said, however, that something somewhat similar to what is even then we will detail today by the consulting firms and public opinion, since in many cases pre-election polls include in its final section the request that the interviewed take an envelope delivered by the interviewer, and make out of sight of it a choice between several ballots that were granted.
Generally the envelope, sealed, placed in an urn or in another larger envelope. But the difference is that this information is contrasted with that obtained in the survey, which does have scientific rigor, if we are talking about a serious institution.
Well, the individuals were a voting ballots through homely, somewhat revoleo who commissioned some American newspapers hungry for scoops.
The first was conducted by the Harrisburg Daily Star and Pennsylvania and Raleigh were local. The procedures, characterized by methodological rigor were not possess such as completing a paper form with the name of the person who was going to vote and then mail it to the drafting, mail surveys and even a "vote" with polls and all done in some busy streets.
Precisely, and because of that lack of rigor, individual votes were an important step on the origin of the opinion polls because they were a terrible failure.
In the twentieth century the best known were those of a magazine, Literary Digest, in 1936 and after spending lots of money in mailing and processing data from surveys 2,000,000 wrongly predicted would win the Republican candidate.
George Gallup, Elmo Roper and Crossley Archival announced, after surveying more than 5,000 people not Eleanor Roostvelt win. And they were not wrong. Gallup and his friends inauguranon the time of the polls employing representative samples adjusted odds of socioeconomic status, gender of the respondents and age.
This, with variations, is what is done today. The impact that caused the failure of Literary Digest and Gallup and company's success led to the knowledge of the general public and widely accepted use of sample surveys of opinion, although market research already used.
In short, as expected, in both the U.S. and Europe came a series of private and state institutions whose primary or sole task was to carry out opinion surveys using sampling procedures.