PBS Poll for Sarah Palin Draws Millions of Votes

Sarah Palin September 8, 2008

The weekly online polls on “NOW on PBS” usually fetch votes in the thousands.

But a poll asking if Sarah Palin is qualified to be vice president touched a nerve – and drew tens of millions of votes.

And in the end, the hardest questions were being asked of “NOW on PBS” – a newsmagazine show on the public broadcasting network.

The Palin poll was posted earlier this month during the Republican National Convention after John McCain announced the Alaska governor as his running mate.

After the poll sparked intense lobbying by blogs on the left and the right, “NOW on PBS” came under fire for not asking the same about other candidates.

“We were focusing on the one question that was timely at the time of the Republican convention because she’d just been introduced as his running mate,” Joel Schwartzberg, director of new media for “NOW on PBS,” said yesterday.

Schwartzberg said the Palin question was “very unbiased” but that people came “en masse” to vote. He said the poll was meant to measure enthusiasm and said no Web poll is scientific.

“NOW on PBS” also was criticized because the poll allowed people to vote more than once. Schwartzberg said PBS didn’t expect the poll “to take off as it did.”

When it realized people were voting more than once, a “cookies mechanism” was installed that allowed only one vote per person, Schwartzberg said.

John Siceloff, executive producer of “NOW on PBS,” issued a public letter Tuesday after receiving throngs of e-mails. Siceloff wrote that according to the single-voter numbers, 50 percent said Palin is qualified to be VP, while 48 percent said no.

~ by Leonidas on September 25, 2008.