Voodoo polls ...

One of my pet hates are what Sir Bob Worcester calls "Voodoo polls". These are classically on-line polls beloved by political web sites.

A beautiful example is the one today on ConservativeHome here. "Two-thirds of Conservative members say Andrew MacKay should cease to be Tory MP"

Er no it doesn't mean that at all. It means that 2/3rd of the people who clicked the buttons said that "Andrew MacKay should cease to be Tory MP". The people who took the poll were self-selecting - they got off their arses and clicked the buttons. How do we know that they were Conservative members? Were their membership numbers checked? Er no. All that happened was that the people said they were Conservative members ... a very very different thing altogether. Next , were the people who were actually Tory party members representative of the party at large? Again we don't know the demographics of the people involved. All we are certain of is that they had access to the Internet. They could have drifted to the website or they all could come from LabourList or LabourHome .

There is nothing to control the poll, nothing to check whether it is being fixed, no attempt to make it a demographic sample. The poll is completely meaningless but it made the Spectator here.

More on Voodoo Polls



Update

It has made Ben Brogan in the Telegraph ...