BNP Supporters Manipulating Online Polls

Comment on BNP Immigration Policy by David.

When I had the BNP as a poll option, BNP supporters campaigned to get the BNP vote unrealistically high (was at around 35% at one point!!!) and it made the poll worthless. Also there was cheating on the part of the BNP supporters, over 800 cheated votes by what looked like one person!

See https://general-election-2010.co.uk/general-election-2010-have-your-say/comment-page-3/#comment-4125

Before I removed the BNP from the poll they had around 12% of the vote (and the % was slowly falling from the 35% high as more organic search engine traffic visited and voted for ALL parties not just the BNP). The BNP do not have 12% of the popular vote as shown by recent by-elections (it’s probably significantly below 5%).

Look at https://general-election-2010.co.uk/weekly-general-election-poll-results/ where Other Parties is averaging around 6% and that’s not all BNP, there are other parties.

The reason why my poll had the BNP at 12% was because BNP supporters had been encouraging other BNP supporters from the main BNP website (which I accept is a popular site) and various pro BNP websites (like Facebook groups with tens of thousands of BNP supporting members) to vote BNP in the poll: I’d been getting a LOT of BNP supporters just visiting my site from around September last year to vote BNP in the poll!

My site was also predominantly filled with pro BNP comments as well!

The 1,800 real BNP votes was not deleted when I removed them as a voting option, I moved them to the Other Political Parties option which took the Other Parties vote to around 2,500 votes (~700 wasn’t votes for the BNP). Even though the BNP manipulated the poll, other than the 800 cheated votes I haven’t deleted BNP votes.

This was near the end of January and since then the Other Political Parties % of the vote has slowly, but surely decline from around 17% to the current 9% because there’s no longer a political reason for BNP supporters to visit my site to manipulate the poll.

Had I been wrong about the BNP supporters manipulating the poll for political gain we’d have seen the Other Political Parties vote % remain above the 15% level if ~15% of my traffic supports the BNP: mostly traffic is now from Google and other search engines rather than a more than fair share from pro BNP websites who all voted BNP (most of my organic search engine visitors don’t bother to vote in the poll, most of the early BNP visitors voted BNP).

If every visitor voted in the poll we’d have seen around 15,000 votes on the 6th of April as that’s roughly how many people visited the site when the election was called by the PM. Since the 6th (less than a week ago) we’d be looking at over 60,000 votes in that time IF everyone voted in the poll, about 7,000 have voted in that time.

Feel free to think it’s some kind of conspiracy against the BNP, but the truth is I had the BNP as a voting option, but BNP supporters ruined my poll so I had to remove them. I’d have rather left the BNP in as a voting option, but unfortunately the BNP supporters have been shown to manipulate polls online which ruins a poll!

David