As a BNP supporter you would say that. If the site was getting

Comment on Weekly General Election Poll Results by David.

As a BNP supporter you would say that.

If the site was getting 1,500 visitors a week directly from the Plaid Cymru Party website and they all voted for Plaid and this pushed their % to 9% say, would you think it right to leave those votes in the poll when they couldn’t possibly gain 9% of the popular vote?

Or if the Lib Dems surge in the vote was mostly from Lib Dem supporting websites specifically telling their visitors to vote Lib Dem in my poll, do you not think to make the poll more valid I should remove some of the votes?

If I let obvious manipulation go unchecked (and the BNP manipulation is very obvious and direct from the BNP’s official website) it makes the poll less valid. Do you honestly believe the BNP are ging to gain 9% of the popular vote? If you think they are why aren’t more search engine visitors voting for the BNP in my poll, take into account one of my top search phrases is BNP Manifesto and BNP Manifesto 2010 (check them in Google)?

The BNP vote after taking away the traffic from the official BNP website is around the 4-4.5% (which is a lot higher than it’s likely to be on May 6th). If the BNP had a massive breakthrough why aren’t the BNP’s vote higher from search engine visitors?

So far this month there has been over 17,000 search engine visitors who have made a search with a phrase including BNP. In comparison the next closest party name Conservative it’s 8,000, with Labour at 6,000 and Liberal at 5,000. Searches including Election are at 200,000, vast majority of the traffic to this site is general searches at the election. The numbers don’t mean there’s 17,000 BNP supporters, 8,000 Conservative etc… just that’s the info they are looking for (note my logs show over 20,000 different keywords, so these are a small percentage of total visitor numbers).

I don’t for one minute think the poll numbers are going to be the actual results on May 6th, there’s been a very clear energising of the Lib Dem support resulting in Lib Dem supporters more likely to find my website, but unlike with the BNP votes I’ve no way to determine what % of the Lib Dem vote is just because of a kind of X-Factor effect** and what’s real countrywide support: if I could determine the %s I would remove some Lib Dem votes as I don’t see how the Lib Dems can gain around 50% of the popular vote.

** Lets imagine the support for the 3 main parties is now split three ways (30% each), but the vote share for the two ‘old parties’ (as Nick Clegg puts it) is falling, while the share for the Lib Dems is on the up. In that situation you are going to have more Lib Dem supporters, especially new Lib Dem supporters searching online for the sort of search phrases that find this website (like Election 2010). So IF they have a 30% share now I’m not surprised the vote share in online polls are way above 30%. It must be very exciting for all Lib Dem supporters right now, hence they are energised.

As it is, if you find my site naturally through a search engine or a link on Facebook (surprisingly don’t get many visitors from Facebook) or other site not specifically saying vote party X, your vote is counted. 2/3ds of votes from the BNP’s official website will be removed. If the Labour parties website started to send 1,500 visitors a week I’d do the same to their vote.

Remember this is only a poll and is just for a bit of fun, don’t take it so blinking seriously.

I plan to change the nature of this website after the election to cover politics generally and in future elections the BNP will be part of Other Parties in any polls I add and I won’t include the BNP’s policies.

Basically the BNP are too high maintenance, Greens and UKIP don’t appear to have a lot of supporters willing to comment online, so in future will only cover the main parties (Labour, Conservatives and the Lib Dems). There’s loads of sites discussing BNP type politics, so there’s plenty of places for BNP supporters to say their piece.

David