Badgerstoke on Polling

With the upcoming vote on the 24^th June my many readers have asked me to run my eyes over the many polls that are being published on an almost hourly basis. I’m glad to say that the latest polls show the “leave” vote pulling slightly ahead and this has caused a great deal of excitement on the internet although, sad to say, not much everywhere else. 

Firstly I need to make it clear that the process of polling no longer involves the use of a physical poll (or pole) and is also not connected with the country of Poland. The word is though to derive from the 18^th Century Practice where landowners would beat their tenants with the said pole until they voted the way they wanted. Thankfully voting is now secret and so the practice has died out in all but the most remote rural constituencies in the Highlands of Scotland.

The polls have always been unreliable in the past. If the polls before the last election had been correct then Nigel Farage and one of the Miliband brothers (I can never remember which is which but in this case I mean the weird looking one) would be in a coalition Government. This would have been an uneasy Labour/UKIP alliance, but one can imaging that a compromise policy of “encouraging immigrants but being unpleasant to them when they arrive” could be made to work.

So why are polls so unreliable? I suspect the blame for this can be laid at the door of people like me. I have always taken the policy of keeping my views secret. This has the advantage of stopping people trying to convince me to change my mind as they have no idea what I think and also it hides that fact that I may not actually have an opinion on the particular subject. However when forced to give my opinion by a persistent researcher then I will often give the opposite view to what I actually think. I am not normally dishonest but in such cases I will make an exception.

Polling organisations have been trying to get people to be more willing to say what they think. One method of doing this is to employ attractive young women to stop men in the street in the hope that they will be less likely to express their displeasure at being delayed on their way to the pub or betting shop. However I think this will still produce unreliable results as I find it is often difficult to concentrate when in close proximity to a young lady with a large chest.

Another problem with any poll is making sure you have an accurate cross-section of the population. Internet polls have shown the leave camp being much further ahead for quite a long time now. But we should bear in mind that the people polled in this way are going to be more introverted and more obese than the average voter. Indeed many of these voters may have problem actually leaving their bedrooms to vote. I think postal voting would be the best thing for many of these people as they could send their mother to the post-box rather than braving the outside World.

The bookmaker have been showing the remain camp quite a way ahead for some time. But this of course will be biased because it will be only based on the views on men of low intelligence (after all they are people who think that giving a large slice of their benefits money to a bookmaker is a sensible thing to do). It is indeed a sad fact that about half the population of the UK has less than average intelligence. Unfortunately these people may vote in the referendum if they can work out how to make their mark on the slip and also remember which day it is on.

Another problem with sampling is where do you take the sample? If you were to poll in Scotland for example you may well get a different result to taking your poll in a more pleasant part of the country. The SNP have been telling us that the Scots are heavily in favour of "remain" for quite a while; mind you they did call the result of the Independence referendum very wrongly and so I’m not sure how much credence we can put on this prediction. On a side issue, I have always wondered why SNP politicians are named after fish: Sturgeon, Haddock & Salmon?

So I think the only conclusion we can draw is that by carefully choosing where, who and when you take your poll you can get the answer you want. And I have noticed that if either side is starting to pull ahead then we get a spate of polls pointing the other way published in the newspapers. Surely it can’t be that the media are trying to make sure it is a close contest because it sells more papers.

So it seems that you can’t take any notice of the polls as they will all have a built-in bias. However I think it is fairly obvious that if you are reading this blog then you are likely to be of greater than average intelligence and so if people would like to tell me how they will be voting then I am willing to do my own informal poll. All votes will be treated in confidence and not used to embarrass anyone later.

Badgerstoke’s Tip: If you want to know which way a poll is biased then just look at the people that paid for it to be done.