I just took one of the pushier “push polls” I have ever heard Tuesday night. Twice.

That’s right. I received two phone calls Tuesday night within a three-hour span from pollsters claiming to represent a group called “North Carolina Jobs.” Both of them asked me the same poll questions each time. And both of them hung up while I tried to ask about the group or why I was called twice.

It gets worse. There were only three questions, each asking if I had a favorable or unfavorable view of the following things — Nash County’s future, the job being done by the Nash County commissioners and the proposed Sanderson Farms plant.

Those were the only choices I was given — approve or disapprove. So I asked the first pollster if there were any other choices. She informed me that “not sure” also was a choice. So I said “not sure” on each question so I could hear them all. When the second pollster called, she only offered approve or disapprove as choices. I asked again if there were other choices, and she also said “not sure” was an option. So I answered “not sure” again on all three questions.

Obviously, this won’t be a scientific poll if people are questioned multiple times. And how can anyone trust people’s responses if the pollsters don’t even read all the possible answers aloud?

I usually warn pollsters I work in the media, since that sometimes disqualifies me. I didn’t get a chance since both pollsters hung up when I tried to talk to them. That’s never happened to me before during a poll.

In case it sounds like I’m nitpicking, I’ve been on the other end of a phone poll before. I was one of the people working the phones for the Carolina Poll for the University of North Carolina in the late 1990s. It was required for certain journalism classes. We had sessions that told us how to administer the poll. We could only read from the scripts provided, and we had to read everything as written with no omissions. If someone didn’t fill out the whole survey or quit partway through, all of their responses were thrown out. There also were rules on what phone numbers we could call to avoid polling the same person twice.

I’m not sure if the problem here is the training of the workers or the poll itself, but I am sure that there’s no way this poll will gather accurate results.