They say that if you cannot beat them, you might as well join them. Obviously nobody has learned their lesson about pollsters. Through most of this past year, we had to put up with polling reports that seemed to have every federal politician except Elizabeth May in the Prime Minister’s role. Why do we listen to people who could not find an elephant in a telephone booth? (Oh damn. Kids today have never seen a telephone booth!)
Can you imagine a stupider way of doing polls than making automated telephone calls to random telephone numbers? How you tell whether the phone is answered by a curious five-year old or a garrulous 85-year old is beyond us? Our approach is to keep pressing numbers at random until that automated voice goes away. If we are not important enough to have a real person call us, you can stick it in your ear.
The silliest aspect of all these different techniques being used by pollsters has been the people would put them together and average them. There was this Internet site called 308 that wandered something like a drunk trying to find his way home.
And then there were the geniuses who were promoting strategic voting. We do trust that you saw that it did not work. One of those strategic voting sites even picked a Green candidate to go with in a riding where the Green got less than five per cent of the vote. Our local riding could have used some strategic voting. Our highly qualified Liberal candidate still lost by 86 votes in the recount.
And now they are doing polls on the ‘honeymoon’ with Justin Trudeau. Can anyone tell us the point of that? What is annoying though is that they throw in other subjects such as proportional voting. Any legitimate poll effort on that subject would first find out if the person knows a damn thing about proportional voting. Then you ask for their opinion on the subject. The first person to be interviewed for that survey should be Prime Minister Trudeau. Does Justin Trudeau even have a clue about the why’s and wherefore’s of proportional voting?
His promise in the election was to study the question. That would be a good idea. This writer will make a point of offering to help. It is very hard in Canada to find a good discussion of voting methods.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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