Polls measure what the public thinks and have long been an important part of journalism, Kathleen A. Frankovic, CBS news producer and director of surveys, told 20 students and faculty Monday in the McCormick Tribune Center.

Frankovic, speaking with the sponsorship of the Medill School of Journalism, said integrity and transparency among pollsters will maintain public trust.

“Journalists need to believe in polls,” she said. “It shouldn’t be up to Dan Rather to give disclaimers about their (accuracy).”

In the 2004 election, Frankovic said, results from different pollsters — collectively referred to as “the polls” — were criticized as inaccurate or partisan. Liberal interest group MoveOn.org criticized Gallup polls for oversampling Republicans, and the Minnesota Republican Party called on the Minnesota Star-Tribune to fire its poll director because he was oversampling Democrats, she said.

In the 2004 Democratic primaries, polls showed for the first time voters most desired a candidate’s seeming ability to be elected, Frankovic said. She said that was why Democrats nominated Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.

Cell phone users, who were not polled in 2004, did not make much difference in the election’s results. This was despite claims that they would vote overwhelmingly for Kerry, she said.

“Kerry had only a small lead with these voters,” Frankovic said.

Some members of the media have criticized exit polls from the 2004 election, saying they overrepresented Democratic voters and misrepresented others by asking if ‘moral values’ influenced their vote, she said.

While Frankovic said exit polls may have oversampled Kerry voters, she said after her speech that the ‘moral values’ question was necessary.

“It took a lot of flack after the election, but I disagree,” Frankovic said. “It identified an important component of the electorate.”

Next week, Frankovic said, an independent report will be released analyzing the effectiveness of the exit polls.

Frankovic also outlined the history of polls in the United States. One of the first presidential election polls was conducted by the Delaware Advertiser, predicting that Andrew Jackson would defeat John Quincy Adams in the 1824 election, she said. The election’s results were inconclusive, and Quincy Adams was chosen by the House of Representatives.

In 1896 the Chicago Record mailed more than 800,000 postcards, asking voters who they planned to vote for, Frankovic said. The poll results were accurate within 0.5 percent for the city of Chicago, but less accurate elsewhere.

Recently, more polls have been conducted, and more topics are considered appropriate for questioning, Frankovic said. More than 100 polls analyzed public opinion on the investigation of former President Richard Nixon in 1973, but ten times as many were conducted about the 1998 impeachment of former President Bill Clinton.

Ed Welsch, a Medill graduate student, said he was particularly interested in the history of polling.

“Obviously the founding fathers never contemplated polling, but I like to see how it influences democracy,” he said.

Reach David Spett at [email protected].