That’s what “Other Political Party” vote option is for. If there’s mass

Comment on General Election 2010 Poll Results by David.

That’s what “Other Political Party” vote option is for. If there’s mass support for a political party I’ve missed, wouldn’t we expect to see the Other Political Party vote to be much, much higher? Last week Other Political Party votes accounted for 7.92% of the votes, that 7.92% covers a lot of potential parties and over the last few weeks it’s around 6%.

At the last general election the BNP gained 0.7% of the popular vote, all 2010 by-elections that the BNP have stood in point to the BNP again polling low (2% if they are lucky) at the 2010 general election, so why would I include such a minor political party which will probably again get no MPs?

The political parties below have more right to be in the poll than the BNP since they gained MPs in 2005 and none of them are included in the main general election poll:

SNP Party : 6 MPs
Democratic Unionist Party : 9 MPs
Sinn Féin Party : 5 MPs
Ulster Unionist Party : 1 MP
Social Democratic and Labour Party : 3 MPs
Independent Parties : 1 MP
Respect Party : 1 MP
Health Concern Party : 1 MP

All the above will account for much of the 7.9% of the Other Political Party votes last week.

When I had BNP as a voting option, BNP activists campaigned to get people to vote in the poll that threw the polls numbers way off what the British public will likely vote at the general election, making the poll useless!

Since removing BNP as an option, BNP activists no longer actively campaign (they no longer post on the BNP websites to come here) to send their supporters to this site to vote and now the vast majority of visitors to my site are organic search engine traffic (mostly from Google for searches like General Election Poll).

If the organic search engine visitors had a high proportion of BNP voters, we’d expect to see the same number of previous BNP votes going to the Other Political Parties option and it’s not happened: see https://general-election-2010.co.uk/weekly-general-election-poll-results/ the Other Political Parties votes has averaged around 6% since I started tracking the votes weekly, yet over the entire period of the poll Other Political Parties (which included the votes the BNP got before I removed that option) is at 12%.

Pretty much proves the BNP activists campaigning to get their supporters to manipulate this poll resulted in about half the current Other Political Party votes and now they are no longer actively campaigning, we are seeing a true representation of how the British public will vote.

That means well under 6% of visitors who vote in the poll are considering voting BNP. The BNP will probably get around 2% in the general election.

If I’m way off (they gain 15% and a half a dozen MPs) feel free to post “I told you so” after the general election, sometime in May :-)

Note: I will not allow this poll pages comments to descend into pointless BNP comments, if you want to state a political point of view, state it clearly without resorting to insulting anyone, otherwise your comment will be deleted.

David