Taped questions are asked of the respondent by a professional announcer (usually a local news anchor), and the respondent is invited to press a button on their touch tone telephone or record a message at a prompt designating their selection.
As of March 2023, the polling analysis website FiveThirtyEight, led by statistician Nate Silver, had 856 SurveyUSA polls in its database, and gave SurveyUSA an "A+" grade on the basis of its historical accuracy and methodology.
Telephone polls vary in usage of live and automated interviewers and implement quasirandom methods to select a respondent from a household.
[5] SurveyUSA states that it conducts minimal weighting on poll results.
Its polls weight demographic variables using either voter files and US Census Bureau figures, depending on the type of sample that was surveyed.