Those useless polls


A little bit more for the opinion polls freaks to consider following on my little piece yesterday. I have done a little summary comparing the performance of Newspolls from those 10 out (about 3 months) from the actual poll right up until the last before the election. Judge for yourself but I find them no help at all in predicting what happens.
10-06-2010 newspollandfinalresultgraph
Perhaps we can conclude that the most consistent feature is that the vote for minor parties is understated throughout the period but I am loathe to make much of it because we are only looking at a sample of what happened in the course of eight elections. That’s too small a sample to be definite about anything.
Conspiracy theorists might want to see something in the Labor vote being higher in the polls than the actual vote received but I very much doubt that is so.
For anyone wanting to fiddle around with the date for themselves I will post it this evening to my blog. I hope you have fun.

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