Voodoo polling corner
A sudden outbreak of voodoo polling this morning, or more to the point a sudden outbreak of serious newspapers reporting a voodoo poll as being meaningful.
What's a voodoo poll? It's what Bob Worcester calls the little "press the red button to vote" polls on Sky News, or the little readers' votes things on the BBC website. They are entertaining enough, but they mean nothing whatsoever, they don't measure the opinion of a representative group of people, they only measure the opinions of people who wander past that particular website (or are directed to said website by people trying to influence the poll) and care enough about the issue to vote...often several times if they know how to delete cookies from their computer. The classic voodoo polls were the old Today programme man of the year things, which used to have flagrant, mass vote rigging to try and get John Major or Tony Blair as the man of the year.
We all know that they don't mean anything and certainly shouldn't be reported as representing public opinion, and yet...The Times this morning reports that "A poll by the Berwick Advertiser showed 79 per cent in favour of switching allegiance from Westminster to Holyrood", the Telegraph claims "the results of a poll have suggested that 80 per cent of the residents agree",The Scotsman tells us that "an online poll has suggested 80 per cent of residents are backing the suggestion",the BBC reveals "a poll carried out by the local newspaper revealed 79% of people in the area backed reunification with Scotland."
The poll in question? It's on the sidebar of the Berwick Advertiser's website here, you can vote in it now if you want. Doesn't matter if you live in Berwick, or indeed the UK. It's a classic voodoo poll, so no attempt to limit it to the proper universe of people, nothing to stop it being fixed, no attempt at producing a demographically representative sample. These things really shouldn't be published by reputable newspapers as an indication of public opinion - or at least - not without heavy caveats about them being non-representative, self-selecting polls.
