Political

Banning polls before elections is a bad idea even if it worked

Survation Eastleigh pollJust under a third of MPs want to see opinion polls banned in the run up to a general election polling day according to a new survey by ComRes.

As both Stephen Tall and Mike Smithson have pointed out, it’s hard to see how such a ban could be effective thanks to the ease of online polling and the ability of the internet to spread news.

In such a context, introducing a ban to a country that is used to there being lots of polls before polling day is asking for trouble. (It’s a little different if there is already a strongly and long-established cultural norm against polls being published at such times.)

However, there is a bigger problem.

Even if such a ban worked, it’s wrong in principle as it would deprive voters of relevant information that many value when deciding who to vote for.

Politicians may not like that so many members of the public decide to be influenced in this way, but tough – in a democracy, it’s the public that gets to decide what issues are important in deciding an election. (A theme Ed Maxfield and I expand on in 101 Ways To Win An Election, complete with the near-obligatory West Wing reference.)

Even if a ban were practical, it still wouldn’t really work – because people will just to turn to other sources of information which would be worse, either because they’re inferior to properly weighted and analysed polls or because they’re shrouded in secrecy and so fail to benefit from the acerbic beneficial effect of public scrutiny of methodologies. (It’s one reason why opinion polls are less controversial in the UK than the US. The UK leaves the US trailing embarrassingly badly when it comes to basic transparency over how political polling is done.)

It’s far better to have people’s votes influenced by public information, that’s legal and open to scrutiny, than by semi-secret, unscrutinised whispered claimed statistics.

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