Made an addition to the 2010 election poll this week, we now

Comment on Weekly General Election Poll Results by David.

Made an addition to the 2010 election poll this week, we now have the BNP as a separate voting option.

I re added BNP to the poll on 17th of April at 1:50pm.

I removed the BNP originally because BNP supporters were manipulating the poll and cheating (800 votes via proxy servers).

With less than 3 weeks to the May 6th election and so many visitors I was hoping any BNP manipulation wouldn’t be an issue, never underestimate BNP online campaigning, they are very good at it.

I took the same number of votes the Green party had on the 17th April, took that number from the Other Political Parties option and added it to the new option of BNP.

This put the BNP on 2,379 Votes or 4% of the vote and decreased the Other Political Parties vote by the same amount.

Over the next two days I tracked the BNP share of the vote around 4.25%-4.50% of the NEW votes.

Unfortunately after a couple of days BNP supporters started to campaign again and over this last week there’s been around 1,500 visitors directly from the official BNP website (it’s a very popular site) in a direct response to BNP supporters asking BNP supporters to vote BNP. What some BNP supporters do is post a link to this site on a random BNP article saying go here and vote BNP.

This happens on other websites (Facebook for example), but not at a rate of 1,500 visitors in the space of about 5 days. For example for this entire month (24 days) the site has received less than 4,000 visitors or for the 5 days period about 800 visitors from Facebook. The Facebook visitors are from a variety of groups, BNP, Lib Dems, Labour, Conservative… so they cancel one another out. The vast majority of the rest of the traffic to this site (over 100,000 visitors a week) are from search engines and of the search engine visitors less than 1/5th bother to vote in the polls.

The 1,500 BNP supporting visitors who arrive here direct from the official BNP website to actually vote throws the poll way off, so I’ve removed 2/3rds of those extra votes in the results above (~1,000 votes).

I think I’ve been more than generous allowing 500 of the visitors direct from the BNP official website to count as the real level of the vote share for the BNP is not going to be around 9% as it would be if I left those ~1,000 votes in.

By rights I should have removed the whole lot, but I’m trying to be fair.

Each week I will count the number of visitors from the BNP official website and remove 2/3rds of them so the poll results are not ruined.

It’s already an issue than Liberal Democrat supporters are energised right now after the TV live debates and voting en-mass, (there’s no way almost 50% of the country will vote Lib Dem on May 6th) but at least the majority of these are mostly search engine visitors and not directly from pro Lib Dem websites.

Ready for the BNP supporter attacks that I’m undemocratic and against free speech or I’m scared of the truth or something about a Lib/Lab/Con conspiracy…. just like I got when I removed them last time. Go too far an I’ll push the BNP votes back to the Other Political Parties again as it’s not worth the hassle just to get a better poll.

To BNP supporters, it’s an online poll, stop trying to manipulate it otherwise it has NO value! The BNP 2010 manifesto was released yesterday, there’s one comment with a link to my site on the page that announced the launch and links to the PDF version of the BNP 2010 manifesto (basically every serious BNP supporter will go to that page). That one link resulted is 300 visitors here overnight and I bet the majority voted BNP.

I’m already regretting adding the BNP back on the poll!

David