“Two of the big winners—SurveyUSA and Rasmussen—use recorded voices to deliver polling questions over the phone, something they say gives them an edge because it eliminates variations in inflection and pronunciation. Rasmussen publisher Scott Rasmussen said the long-term consistency of its computer-generated polling, plus adjustments it made in methodology—including weighting by party identification and expanding its definition of “likely voters”—resulted in one of its best years to date.”

“Pollsters Generally Had It Right, But Missed Some Key Battles”
    The Wall Street Journal
    November 3, 2004

For starters, they aren’t robots. They’re recordings of human voices. Pollsters who use this technology argue that the uniformity achieved by automation—every respondent hears the questions read exactly the same way—outweighs any distortions caused by people hanging up or lying to the recordings. They also argue that the interviewers who read questions and record answers in “human” polls are all too human. A human poll may bear the name of a major newspaper or television network, but the interviews are usually “outsourced” to a company you’ve never heard of and conducted by whoever is willing to make the phone calls—which sound a lot like telemarketing—for modest wages.

“We won’t settle the relative merits of the two approaches in this article or this election. But when the two major automated pollsters score either second and first-or third and tied for first, depending on how you count it-in round-robin match-ups with the three major human pollsters, it’s time to broaden the experiment in automated polling and compare results to see what’s working and why. Clearly, the automated pollsters are onto something, and the human pollsters who have fallen behind will have to figure out how to beat it—or join it.”

“Who nailed the election results? Automated pollsters.”
    Slate
    December 9, 2004