Geoff Skelley, media relations coordinator for the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, noted that "all polls have just slightly different methodology."
Websites that average numerous different polls can sometimes help in trying "to find a balance" and smooth out any irregularities in individual polls, he explained.
Georgetown's Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate has aggregated data from polls on Catholics conducted by Pew, Gallup and TIPP. The results indicated a close race over the last several months, in which neither candidate consistently garnered more than 50 percent of Catholic support.
The recent inconsistencies in poll results extended beyond merely the Catholic vote and into the general population as well.
Joe Garofoli of the San Francisco Chronicle observed that a Sept. 19 Pew Research poll showed Obama leading Romney by eight percentage points, while a Gallup survey taken over the same time period had them tied.
Discrepancies such as these, he said, can be attributed to the different wording of questions, differing methods of attempting to integrate cell phone users into polls and differences between polling "registered voters" and "likely voters."
In early August, Pew was critiqued for a survey showing Obama with a 10-point lead over Romney in a poll that included nearly twice as many self-identifying Democrats as Republicans.
Pew defended its poll in a statement asserting that standardizing the distribution of Democrats and Republicans "would unquestionably be the wrong thing to do."
The research center explained that "party identification is one of the aspects of public opinion that our surveys are trying to measure, not something that we know ahead of time like the share of adults who are African American, female, or who live in the South."
"(S)hifts in party identification are essential to understanding the dynamics of American politics," it said.
Some critics, however, said that such a significant inequality in party distribution could be making the polls less accurate.
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Columnist Jim Geraghty complained in the National Review Online that Pew has made a "habit of including an unrealistic percentage of Democrats in their sample."
He argued that the organization has been inaccurate in polling before recent elections because its polling samples do not reflect the fact that "the electorate is going to be more than 24 percent Republican, and self-identified Democrats aren't going to outpace Republicans by 9 percentage points."
Commentator Dick Morris suggested that the polls being produced by many organizations are flawed because they are using the 2008 election as a model for weighting respondents.
However, it is unlikely that African Americans, Latinos and young adults will have the same unusually high voter turnout in this election that they did in 2008, he said, pointing to surveys indicting a lack of enthusiasm and novelty, as well as a sense of disappointment, among these groups.
As a result, he argued, many polls showing Obama with a drastic lead over Romney are actually "misleading."
Michelle La Rosa is deputy editor-in-chief of Catholic News Agency. She has worked for CNA since 2011. She studied political philosophy and journalism at the University of Dallas.