A UW-Madison political scientist has joined a national panel to analyze 2008 presidential primary polling results, the university announced Monday.

Charles Franklin was named to an American Association for Public Opinion Research Ad Hoc committee to examine why polls have predicted the wrong results in some presidential primaries.

“Our mission is to be able to look at the primaries including [Tuesday] night to decide what worked better and what didn’t work so well and try to reach conclusions about that,” said Franklin, a nationally-known polling expert and co-developer of the online polling website, Pollster.com.

“Given the errors that we saw in New Hampshire where the polls consistently expected [Barack] Obama to win and then [Hillary] Clinton won … Why is that? We want to be able to answer that for the public.”

Franklin said the 11-member committee is a combination of polling professionals and academics from several universities. According to a statement, polls in New Hampshire wrongly predicted a double-digit Democratic victory for U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. over U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y. After the votes were counted, Clinton took 39 percent of the vote over Obama’s 36 percent.

The committee will also examine 2008 pre-election polls to help explain what happened in New Hampshire—if voters changed their minds on election day or if the polling was flawed.

“Is it something about the polling? We have a number of explanations that have been suggested, but we hope to be able to examine the data from the original pollsters to answer what happened and why,” Franklin said.

“In the best of circumstances, that will let us include polling in the future.”