reach at home. Some has to do with the use of technologies such as caller identification, voice mail and privacy managers. And some is a result of a growing unwillingness on the part of some people to be interviewed. We have done a great deal of research on whether declining response rates harm the accuracy of polls. Fortunately there is, as yet, little evidence that nonresponse is creating a serious issue with the validity of polls. (Also see The problem of declining response rates for more information) Why don't you just conduct surveys on your website? Good question. Or, more generally, why don't we conduct our polls on the internet, or trust internet polls? It would certainly be less expensive. But polls conducted among people on the internet would not be valid for generalizing to the general population because of two obvious problems: not everyone has internet access (at least 20% of the public does not), and people available and willing to take a poll on the internet do not constitute a representative sample of the public. See Internet surveys for more information on conducting surveys on the web. A good example of the problems with internet polling is described in this 1999 analysis from the height of the controversy over President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky: What about people who don't have any telephone service? Unfortunately, for most of our surveys, people who do not have telephones are not included in the sampling frame. Because of this, they have