Vote manipulation? Yes.
Just what we need? Definitely.
I cannot think of a scenario where having more people in a representative sample would be worse than having less.
Just what we need? Definitely.
I cannot think of a scenario where having more people in a representative sample would be worse than having less.
It looks good if have there are a lot of people participating but you have not gained anything if those that voted did not have the slightest of interest in it.
Even the well-informed can end up thinking "my vote doesn't matter anyway, so why bother." And rationally, they are not exactly wrong. Yet, the system would break down if everyone took that view. People need to be encouraged to vote, even though they may see it as a waste of time, because in aggregate their votes are important.
It is well-known that the subset of the population that goes to the polls is NOT representative of the country as a whole. That is why pollsters are so careful to get polls of "likely voters". Because Republicans tend to be more motivated to vote than Democrats, so if they just took a poll of everyone they called, the results would always be strongly skewed Democrat.
(Getting this right is very tricky, and different methodologies around it is one reason that different pollsters often have a consistent difference in the polls that they produce.)