According to exit polls, the voting "gender gap" was 22 points in the 2016 House of Representatives election; that is, women voted for Democrats by 10 percentage points, and men voted for Republicans by 12 percentage points. Political scientists are curious to see if this gap holds- or increases- in 2018, but statisticians might be more interested in the processes behind exit polling and the rellabllity of thelr results. When conducting exit polls, pollsters will randomly select a certain number of precincts, then attempt to get all the voters leaving the polling place to participate in their poll. If they can't get all voters, they will instead attempt to get every nth voter to participate. Many polling companies believe that Democrats are more likely to agree to an exit poll than Republicans or Independents.
Of course, not everyone votes in the morning/mid-afternoon of the election. To get an idea of the preferences of people who voted in the precinct before election day, typically by absentee ballots, companies will attempt a random telephone survey of those voters. Exit polls often wrap up and leave the field before voting stations close, so people voting in the last couple hours of the day may also be missed
(a) What type of sampling methods are used in selecting people for exit polls?
a. Simple Random Sampling
b. Cluster Sampling
c. Stratified Sampling
d. Convenience Sampling
e. Systematic Sampling
(b) Why do the polllng companles randomly select the preclncts to vislt?
a. Randomly selecting precincts to assign pollsters ensures that the companies can conclude a cause and effect relationship between the voters' beliefs and their voting pattern
b. There are too many precincts to manually select, so they are forced to randomly select them
c. Randomly selecting precincts increases the likelihood that the people polled represent the population well.