You are here: Home » Featured » Misleading Poll Released By Military Group Opposed To DADT Repeal

Misleading Poll Released By Military Group Opposed To DADT Repeal

08/11/10-by Bridgette P. LaVictoire
One thousand Americans who identify themselves as likely to vote in upcoming elections have stated that they oppose repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell according to a survey released by The Military Culture Coalition, which itself opposes repeal of DADT. According to them and their supporters, this is proof that “American voters do not support a plan to abolish restrictions on homosexuals entering military service.” Except that non-biased polls show that support for repeal of DADT is somewhere between 59% and 75% depending on the poll, the question, and the number of people asked.

This is one of those cases where people are using statistics to lie. In fact, the report on this from Catholic Culture does not include a breakdown of the numbers. Instead, one has to go to a Baptist site in order to find out that the numbers are 48% opposed to 45% supporting repeal, and that would be well within the margin of error for the poll which appears to have been designed to get the results that it got.

The group asked a very misleading question in “Would you prefer that your elected representatives in Washington, D.C. vote to overturn the 1993 law and allow homosexual persons to serve openly in the military, or vote to keep the law as it is?” This is not a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ quesiton the say that others polls have tended to ask. Instead, they put the answer that they want ‘vote to keep the law as it is’ last, and that tends to skew the results. Another bias in the poll is “homosexual persons” this is done to elicit a negative response since polls that mention ‘homosexual’ instead of ‘lesbian or gay’ have tended to have lower numbers. This poll is also of likely voters, and only a thousand of them, and it is less likely to be accurate.

Polls done of all Americans have show that the vast majority of voters support repeal, and those were done with a strong enough number of respondents to get better results. This poll was done to influence public opinion and not to actually get a real result. Even so, the fact that they had results which were well within the margin of error, which is likley stated at 4% and probably closer to 8 or 9 percent means that this poll actually shows that the support is for repeal, not for keeping the law as it is.  Of course, polls worded in a manner similar to this one have returned similar results because they also had major underlying biases.