AP football poll voting ...

Question: Are votes kept private? As in, if Tom Jones from an Alabama paper votes the Tide above Florida after the Gators stomp them, could his vote be made public?

College or high school level applies in this situation.

Rhode Island doesn't have a HS football poll (no AP service and we only have 43 teams in the state); our paper has run an informal Top 20 the past two years but this year I've amped it up and am trying to get the entire state involved. One of the concerns people have had is voting being made public. My response has been I'm going to do the same thing the AP does with their polls, only I didn't know what the answer was so for now, I'm keeping them private.

 

I think the votes are online each week somewhere, maybe on the AP site. I could be wrong.

 

This site does a great job breaking down all the polls. You can see individual ballots and how they compare to others. It's color coded so you can easily see if a particular voter has a team ranked significantly higher or lower than the average.

For example, you can quickly look up Kirk Herbstreit and see that he voted Utah No. 5 in the final AP poll last year and that six others agreed. Nobody ranked the Utes lower and 58 had them higher.

http://pollspeak.com/pollstalker/pollstalker.php

 

I was a voter in 2005 and '06 and the votes were always made public. Never had a problem with it. I liked the fact there was some accountability.

I also liked the fact that AP decided to remove the poll from the BCS, even if the decision came late. Call me old fashioned, but I think we should be covering the news, not making it.

 

In your scenario, I'd probably think about keeping them private, especially since your trying to get it off the ground.

I'm sure it could be something of interest for readers across the state.

Some of the other voters may only be hesitant to do this because they're not sure how it will be received. If you keep the votes private for the first year, it gives everyone a chance to get used to the voting process. And then you can re-evaluate going into year two.

 

I vote in our state's AP high school football and basketball polls. I don't know if that is available to the public. It lists our paper as a voting paper when it moves on the wire, but I don't know if how we vote is available anywhere.

 

My boss had a vote a few years ago, but he liked to go to bed early. Well, it was the night that USC beat Notre Dame on the last play and he went to bed voting Notre Dame above USC. He was awakened the next morning and had to BS to the AP guy that writes the poll story why he voted Notre Dame above USC.
If you vote weird, they will call and ask you.

 

Thats what I'm leaning toward right now Hank.
My biggest problems so far are getting people to commit to voting. Everyone wants the poll, but the states big paper and TV stations don't want to participate. I've already told them that if they don't participate, they're not getting one. Good thing is the people who are helping are just as hardcore about it as I am.
We've had two big issues otherwise, one being in RI, our divisions are separated by talent, not school size, and people are concerned about voting a team for a lower division with a great record over a team from a high division with a so-so record. The other is not every paper sees every division so they don't want to misjudge teams.
I don't think these people quite grasp how HS football polls work in other states.

 

The people who visit Pollspeak voted me the worst AP voter one week during men's basketball season. I wore it as a badge of honor.

 

Didn't that game end at like 7 p.m. EST? Is the guy narcoleptic?

 

They only did that one week? Just one?

 

There was a weekly thing where you could vote for the best or worst poll voter. I only got into the mix once, largely over a 25th-place vote for Utah.