The Harris Interactive College Football Poll added one extra voter this year.  The addition was unnecessary and goes against the HICFP process for assigning voters. After repeated attempts to correct the situation with Harris Interactive, they have either been unable to or refuse to admit the error.

Our contact at Harris Interactive said, "There isn't an extra voter,"  but also agreed that there are only four independent schools: Army, Navy, BYU and Notre Dame.  If true, there should only be 114 voters (as in previous years) instead of the 115 voters listed this year.  The method for choosing voters in the HICFP is very simple:  10 voters are chosen per FBS conference.  There are 11 conferences so that means 110 voters.  One voter is added for each independent FBS school.  There are 4 independents, so that means a total of 114 voters.  There is a chance that an extra voter was left over when Western Kentucky changed from an independent to the Sun Belt conference.  However, that is just an assumption since Harris Interactive has yet to admit the mistake and reveal who has the extra vote.

Pollspeak contacted Harris Interactive about this error before the first poll was released.  We tried to correct the situation for them before they released the poll, but they refused to investigate or just didn't understand the problem.  Now some unidentified conference (or independent) has one extra vote compared to the others. As Pollspeak has maintained in the past, problems like these could be avoided in the future with more transparency.  Namely, when Harris Interactive releases the list of voters at the start of the season, they should also list the conference affiliations along with the voters' names. Secondly, voter ballots should be made public every week of the season, in the same way that the AP Poll provides.

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