Kefka
Member
Proponents of measures to prohibit same-sex "marriage" say New Jersey's Supreme Court ruling that same-sex couples "deserve the same rights" as heterosexual couples will motivate voters to pass constitutional bans.
But most of the measures on the Nov. 7 ballot in eight other states already have strong voter support. In fact, they may be even farther ahead than they appear, because polling on the issue has been consistently and inexplicably inaccurate.
Same-sex "marriage" ban supporters and opponents agree that pre-election polls often undercount support for the measures.
Voters in 15 states have approved such bans since August 2004, and polls conducted before elections in seven of them underestimated the yes vote. (No polls were published in three of the states, and poll results in the other five were within the margin of error.)
Polls that underestimated support for the bans were off by as much as 19 percentage points in North Dakota and 7 to 16 percentage points in six other states.
Polls have been published on the proposed constitutional amendments in six of those states, and in all six, the most recent survey showed the bans passing -- in Arizona by a margin of 9 percentage points, and in Tennessee by 53 percentage points.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/10/27/MNG74M100V1.DTL