From Robert Worcester, MORI
London
Your otherwise excellent article on “voodoo” polls (Technology, 18 January, p
20) somewhat compounded the confusion by its headline. Please don’t call them
“telephone polls”, but “phone-in polls”, to differentiate them from legitimate
telephone polling. And please do not call these telemarketing people who have no
training in stats or polling “pollsters”, confusing them with those of us who
spend a vast amount of our time in social survey or market research work, who
are trained for the job, who know that “random” does not mean “haphazard”, but
equal probability of selection, and who abhor these travesties of democracy as
much as Barry Fox.
These voodoo polls, now dwindling and discredited in the US, distort
democracy and are merely a measure of how effective pressure groups are in
mobilising their forces to ring in over and over again in an effort to bandwagon
their candidate for, for example, the BBC Today programme’s so-called
“Person of the Year” contest, the BBC Radio 5 Live phone-in on Prince Philip’s
remarks about the banning of handguns, and this huge fiasco of a programme on
the monarchy.
Like you, I tested their phone-in system, telephoning 10 times. Seven times
counted, according to the recorded voice, and the other three times were
disenfranchised.
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