TEA Party Patriot organizers bungle straw poll survey

A straw poll of 23,000 conservative activists on Sunday went awry when organizers messed up the instructions for phone-in participants to follow for choosing who they want for GOP presidential nominee.
The polling of TEA Party Patriots listening to four of the seven lead contenders who participated with the phone-in forum were told that they would first vote for who they thought did the best in providing answers during the questioning period.
Instructions explained that then they would be given a chance to choose who of all the seven remaining top contenders they would support for Republican nominee, regardless of participation in the forum.
It was after the forum that the straw poll began, first with a choice of who listeners liked among the forum participants. Only the question was: who do you support from among these four to be the Republican nominee.
Then the instructions changed further, compounding the problem even more. When the second question came, asking whom of the other three candidates do you support, the rules also changed again: only the three, Ron Paul, John Huntsman and Richard Perry, were included for the choices of the second question.
To make matters worse, respondents were only just then informed that if they chose a candidate from among the first four, during the first question, then their response to the second question would not be counted.
This confusion led many to chose from the four forum participants first, then have no recourse to chose a favorite candidate if their favorite was among the second group.
The fact that the straw poll did not place all candidate choices together in a clear selection process with clear instructions that did not change negates the straw poll's credibility.
It is sad that the whole event was completely bungled. It was advertised as a means of gauging conservative TEA Party support for Republican presidential contenders without media manipulation.
Then with the confusion about the instructions, and how the instructions changed, the result was a bungled survey that can't be trusted.
The TEA Party Patriots website indicated the results of the bungled straw poll would be posted at 8 a.m., Monday - December 19.