Are 250News Polls Fairly Accurate
Prince George- Given that there seemed to be some confusion, and also some posters who suggested that you can "fix" any poll that we at 250news conduct, we asked our Webmaster, who is an expert on these matters and his reply is as follows.
I took a look. The poll currently will only let you vote once based on a cookie. It isn’t foolproof, but it should be good enough for your purposes.
So while we agree, that you can get around the poll, if we find anyone using this as a means to circumvent what is designed to be, a feeling of the community, we will simply remove your privilege and that will prevent a re-currence.
The whole object of the opinion poll is to take a "pulse" of what readers are thinking about a specific topic. We have never said the poll or its results were scientific, but, it is a way to gauge the community's interest in a subject, nothing more. We might add, we regularly have far more participation in our little online survey than the City achieves with its polls, which are no more scientific than ours. Yet, the City refers to its poll results when making major decisions on any number of issues.
We just offer our results as food for thought.
Comments
I don’t participate in online polls, but I’m pretty sure you can set your browser up to not accept cookies, so that you can vote as many times as you want, as some users were recently claiming.
If people vote more than once they must not have a hell of a lot to do.
May I repeat, if you try to circumvent the system, and we spot your IP address which is available to us, every time you log in, we will take away your privilege to comment, vote, or whatever.
If you can’t live within the system as a privilege and you have to cheat , I’m sure we will survive without you, no matter who.
And what is the point of these polls? its not like it changes anything
Without getting into a huge essay about statistics. Polls are only accurate if your sampling over a wide range of population and your accounting for errors and biases (standard deviations). In any case a media outlet asking polling questions needs to take into account their own biases based on their target readers who share same viewpoints.
Restricting votes by cookies sounds great.
Unfortunately, the cookie bit is broken. No offense to the webmaster–bugs happen.
You can verify that they are broken. Go to the vote results. Then press Ctrl-U in your browser to see the page source. Search for “vote” in the page source. Now you can see how many votes have been cast. Keep in mind that you need to refresh the page and view the source and votes each time you want to check how many votes have been counted.
Now vote a few times and watch the votes cast go up by exactly the number of times you vote. Do it at 2am to make make sure. Pick a few random number of votes and see what happens.
If the vote counts goes up by the number of times you clicked on vote and you do several trials, eventually you’ll have a certain confidence that you are the one increasing the vote count.
But how can that be? Cookies were on?
The cookie idea sounds great, but it’s broken.
Here’s to getting it fixed.
“I don’t participate in online polls, but I’m pretty sure you can set your browser up to not accept cookies, so that you can vote as many times as you want, as some users were recently claiming.” You can easily make it so you can’t vote if your do not turn on your cookies. That being said the results here are totally bias because most people who take the time to come here and comment tend to have views very similar to the negative connotations of each poll. I think threatening people with removing their “privilege” of being here is bit over the top. You act like the people who come here are not important to you. Try getting some advertising dollars, Ben, if no one came here because of this over reaction by you.
Actually, the programming to ensure people only poll once is not that difficult. Of course, there is always a way to get around things, but just a few simple roadblocks will keep most people on the level. Start by forcing people to sign in before polling for starters. Coming at the site from different IP addresses is simple enough, but building multiple ID’s from different IP addresses and e-mail address requires more dedication and work than a simple opinion poll is worth to most folks.
Most of the time I can’t remember if I voted on the poll or not; for some odd reason I keep seeing the option to vote every time I visit the main page. Which, in 2013, is not something I’m used to seeing on the internet. If I’ve participated in a poll I never get the option to do so again.
So I just left 250news and browsed another site. Came back here and, lo and behold! I have the option to participate in the poll once again. But I’m pretty sure I already did? Or did I?
I’m not attempting to circumvent anything; the things poorly programmed to start with.
Lol Ben you can be hacked faster than Sara Palin can say Wiki leaks but no one wants to bother with such a small site. People hide behind IP addresses all the time.
Why don’t we just continue with the assumption that the online poll results mean nothing.
I guess it depends on how you describe “fairly accurate”, but from a statistically validated point of view, I would say that no they aren’t. northman and huh nailed the reasons why.
Most of the polls are a no brainer in the first place. I think its a good start to get an idea for example of should we have the PAC. The poll gives you a rough idea of how some people understand economics.
I certainly want to thank Ben and crew for having the guts and energy to bring to peoples attention the terrible spending fiasco that the city of Prince George has been on. Its like they really want to hurt the taxpayers. To say the least. I think it may be time to have people flood city hall with sighns and media. Maybe none of us should pay our taxes. Then what would happen to all these red herring projects.I ask, People of Prince George,consider what im saying, we may be in trouble here.
I think we need a poll to see if the polls are accurate
“We might add, we regularly have far more participation in our little online survey than the City achieves with its polls, which are no more scientific than ours. Yet, the City refers to its poll results when making major decisions on any number of issues.”
The city shouldn’t be referring to it’s polls as accurate because you can vote as much as you like on their polls as well. I found that out on the last poll the city placed on their site.
The only polls I’ve seen that were even close to accurate were using an e-mail address and (CHAPTCA? numbers letters thing) to vote.
The way around that one is to post to a message board or use social media to ask others to vote your way.
Online polls have the potential to be very inaccurate and I believe most of them are just that.
Ben’s got the right idea. If you have to cheat on the polls then you should get dumped. Most people want to get as accurate information as possible on issue’s and they don’t need some dweeb spending the day ensuring that the poll is useless.
Time for some people to grow up.
“If you have to cheat on the polls then you should get dumped”
There is a slight problem with that … the smartest cheaters win.
Ben has basically put a challenge out there. I doubt too many will be bothered with it since the consequences of “winning” or “loosing” the poll are not earth shattering or even important to anyone.
I just checked …. the vote number is 1217 at the moment and the two sides are statistically pretty well even.
Last night, with just under half of the number of votes now, it was 4 to 1 for having a referendum.
And that means what? That those were honest votes? That the some on the for side were cheating by voting several times? That people were calling or texting people to go and vote for having a referendum ….. and then the PAC group saw what was happening and got legitimate opposition to vote, or that the group cheated by a few or less voting frequently?
We do not know, do we?
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