Political polls- how they work and what they do

MADISON, Wisc. -- For the past twelve years, Charles Franklin has crunched the numbers and during an election year, his job gets a little bit busier.

As the director of the Marquette Law School Poll, Franklin tracks the public persecution of candidates and issues.

"I think you should look at polls for what they can tell us about ourselves, what they say about people that don't agree with me," he said. "Take it for what it's worth. In the end, polls don't vote. People do."

What you need to know

According to 538 , a pollster ranking system, the Marquette Law School Poll is the third best in the nation. For transparency, it ranks first in the nation, beating out polls like The New York Times/ Sienna Poll.

"We're not in a business, we're not selling information to campaigns that have an incentive to keep things secret."" We're not working for any interest group that wants a certain outcome," Franklin said. "We are here to provide public information, it just made sense from the very beginning to make that as completely public and transparent as we could."

Franklin also mentioned that partisan polling groups do tend to swing in favor of their party's candidate. However, if you're worried about the integrity of a poll he recommends looking at sites like 538 and RealClearPolitics.com to check polls against one another. Polls are often not 100% accurate, he added.

"Are they all pretty close to one another? Do they range quite a bit? Do they show one candidate leading but by different amounts, or do they show both candidates leading at one in one poll or another? I think that's the best way for interested people to just get an easy sense of how much the polls are varying," he said.

Franklin said his poll releases data on the questions asked, crosstabs, demographics, methodology and margin of error.

Balance also comes in other forms, like weighting, when assessing polling data. Weighting essentially evens out the respondents to be reflective of the census.

"We know that there's actually about 15% of people under 30 who are registered to vote." "So if our sample comes back with 10% in that age group, we give them extra weight so that in the weighted sample we have the right percentage under 30," Franklin said.

The margin of error seen when reading polls, essentially accounts for the sample size and weighting.

Behind the scenes

To get the polling data is a multi-week process. Here's how it works:

Writing the questions is the first hurdle pollsters face.

"This is something that there's a deep literature and training on. I think the simplest way to understand it, though, is we try to write questions that are is flat and neutral as we know how to write," Franklin said. "That includes not putting in strong adjectives to describe some event where there are two clear competing sides."

The next step is sending those question to a company for field work. That company is tasked with outreach.

"Then they send me that completed data and I do all of the analysis of the data, write up the poll release and the results," Franklin said.

Marquette Law School Polls sample from a list of registered voters and send an email and text to everyone sampled. The messages detail the organization and provides a link to complete the poll online. The message also gives an email address that respondents can contact for questions. Franklin said they will call voters who have not responded to the poll after a certain amount of time.

The next Marquette Law School poll is set to be released on Oct. 2 and will look at the race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. According to a press release , it will also look at perceptions of Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) and Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) as well as surveying voters for issues that are important to them.

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