National Affairs: Public's Opinion of Polls

Every election year Los Angeles' City News Service conducts a telephone poll of Los Angeles residents on a few major ballot choices, supplies the results to local newspaper clients. The polling is carried out mostly by college students, who pick the names at random from metropolitan Los Angeles' five phone books. Over the years, Editor Joseph Quinn has come to expect about 1,500 replies out of 3,000 calls. But this year things went wildly wrong. C.N.S.'s results in last week's poll on Nixon v. Kennedy, plus two local ballot questions:

Total calls made: 3,812.

Hung up without: listening to a single question: 2,107.

Listened...

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