While Americans wait election resultsmany turn to surveys for answers.

Dr. Andy Smith of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center joined FOX’s LiveNOW on Election Day with tips for deciphering the polls and how to better understand them.

What is the margin of error?

The margin of error describes how close a survey result can reasonably be to the true representative of the entire population. In other words, even the purest random sampling of interviewers will not exactly match the entire U.S. population.

Calculating the margin of error works thanks to a complex mathematical theory known as the central limit theorem, Smith told us, but gave us some tips on how to understand it more easily.

He said the biggest confusion about sampling error is that people think it applies to the percentage gap between candidates, which it doesn’t.

“What you need to do is apply a margin of sampling error to both estimates,” he said. “So Donald Trump at 46%, in this example (with a 3% margin of error), he could be as low as 49%; he could be as low as 43%. Harris, at 50%, could be as low as 47% or up to 53%.”

“We really need to double the margin of sampling error if we want to understand whether the gap between these two candidates is statistically significant,” he added.

RELATED: Polls for the presidential election: who is currently in the lead?

Telephone or digital surveys

FILE – A close-up photograph of a man holding a cell phone.

“The polling industry is going through what I would call a paradigm shift, where we’re moving away from the types of methods that worked 30 or 40 years ago that don’t really work anymore,” Smith said.

He said response rates to telephone interviews have declined significantly in recent years, to the point where he said only about 5 percent of people contacted for telephone surveys actually responded.

“This results in very, very expensive telephone surveys and, (as we saw) in 2016, inaccurate telephone surveys,” he said.

He said more investigations will be conducted digitally in this election, but there are also several different methodologies for digital methods.

“After this election, we’re going to do quite a bit of research to understand which of the methodologies used actually gave the best results, and use the knowledge we’ve gained going forward,” he said.

“I’m very cautious in saying that one survey is better than another right now because frankly, we just don’t know. We’re in the middle of this development of our best practices and we’re not still at the end.

RELATED: When will we know the results in the swing states?

Aberrant polls

Every election cycle, a handful of polls release shocking results that attract considerable attention.

More recently, it was the highly anticipated survey by J. Ann Selzer, Iowa’s “gold standard” pollster, showing Kamala Harris beating Donald Trump by 3 points in the Hawkeye State.

LEARN MORE: New Iowa poll shows Harris ahead by 3 points in Hawkeye State

So how do some poll results vary so differently?

Smith says this could be due to the way the survey was conducted or because an unusual sampling group was used, which could have excluded a certain demographic.