Pioneer Press

Somebody's lying in New Brighton.

Actually, more than 100 residents recently surveyed must have lied or, as the surveyor prefers to say it, "misremembered" whether they voted in the last local election.

Results of the survey, presented this week to the New Brighton City Council, found that 47 percent of 400 residents questioned said they "always" vote in the city's local elections.

In fact, a mere 17.7 percent of registered voters actually turned out to vote Nov. 8, 2005, the last election the suburb held, according to Ramsey County figures.

Such discrepancies aren't uncommon in surveys about voting, experts say. For example, if questioners asked today whether you voted in this week's primaries, 5 percent to 10 percent of those who didn't would say they did, one past Twin Cities study found.

"Why would people tell the truth?" said professor Sanford Weisberg, director of the University of Minnesota's Statistical Consulting Service. "People always want to say what pleases people. People don't want to be embarrassed."

Weisberg says the clearest examples of the phenomenon occur when people surveyed might feel like criminals, such as when they are asked whether they get high. "You wouldn't want to think that smoking marijuana is like (not) voting, but the pattern might be similar," he said.

Weisberg says the other possibilities are that the survey sample didn't reflect the larger community or that people "just don't remember" how frequently they vote.

It's gotta be the latter, says Bill Morris, president of Minneapolis-based Decision Resources Ltd., which New Brighton hired to conduct the survey. He's confident the 400 people called from the company's St. Paul phone banks do accurately represent the whole community.

"I like to call it misremembering," Morris said with a chuckle. "For the most part, people don't want to lie. The longer the time between the survey and the actual date of election, the wider the discrepancy."

Several years ago, Morris says, he did a survey 10 days after an election specifically to find out how well people remembered whether they voted. The misremembering rate ranged from 5 percent to 10 percent.

New Brighton paid $4,600 for the survey primarily to gauge residents' satisfaction with city services and how receptive they might be to tax increases.

Gina Baumann, whose CuppaChiodo's coffee shop provides a daily chance to survey New Brighton residents, says she's not willing to call her community a bunch of fibbers.

"I don't know what those numbers mean," said Baumann, who serves on the City Council. "Most of the people who come into my shop vote. The people who watch or who read or who talk to me about the issues, those are the people who have to be voting. … I can't say they're lying. I'm hoping that's not what they're doing."