Sarah Palin polling madness
dan tynan on Sep 22 2008 at 6:16 am | Filed under: Quizzes, Web 2.0
So I got an email from one of my more rabidly liberal friends the other day. She wrote:
PBS has a poll that asks: Is Sarah Palin qualified to be VP? It shows that more people are saying YES than NO! Let’s turn this around…..You don’t have to give your name or email address in order to vote. It’s very simple, just 2 clicks. Here’s the link.
I clicked and voted "No" (duh). Then I reloaded the poll and voted again. And again, and again.
Unlike a lot of online polls, the site didn’t do anything to keep me from voting multiple times. It didn’t drop a cookie on my hard drive or record my IP address. I didn’t even have to clear my cache or switch browsers. So…. No No No No No No.
But the meter didn’t budge. My votes had no discernible impact. I sent an email to NOW on PBS asking them about their polling methodology. I just got a call back from Joel Schwartzman, director of new media for the program. He admitted that the NOW poll allowed people to vote multiple times. Then he told me something that totally blew my mind. He said they run polls on different topics every week. Usually they get 300 to 700 votes, and until now they’d never broken the 1,000 vote barrier.
How many votes did the Sarah Palin poll generate? Here’s what he told me:
43,442,000
Yes, that’s right. 43 f*****g million votes. How’d this happen? A link to the poll got spammed out, most likely by someone at a conservative blog (Joel mentioned "freepers" — that would be FreeRepublic.com). And then the libs heard about it and they started spamming it out. The poll started out trending toward "unqualified" before the Freepers got to it, he said. Since I voted it’s started to slowly trend back (but at this rate it will never get back to 50/50).
As a result of that poll, traffic to the NOW on PBS site spiked 4,000 percent. (Now I know how to get people to read this effin blog — p**s off the conservatives.)
The program has no immediate plans to change how it conducts polls. As Joel notes, even online polls that keep you from voting multiple times are not scientific. "They’re mostly good for showing how vehement people are on a particular issue," he says. "I think people understand online polls are more like games that measure their enthusiasm than things that show what people are actually thinking."
Are you qualified to be vice president? Take my snarky quiz at the WitList and find out. And feel free to post your comments below or email me direct: dan (at) dantynan (dot) com.
OMG; and this is from our friends at PBS! Mindblowing. Thanks for digging this story up.
Interesting to me is the fact that 0% were unsure. Are we really that partisan that everybody is sure one way or another more than a month from the election? Maybe the spammers knocked down a real number of not-sures to a statistically immeasurable level.
And can’t Dan figure out a way to vote multiple times besides just clicking on the mouse over and over? What about the famous Drinking Bird next to the mouse? http://scientificsonline.com/product.asp?pn=3053617&bhcd2=1222109757
[...] She wrote: PBS has a poll that asks: Is Sarah Palin qualified to be VP? It shows that more people are saying YES than NO! Let’s turn this around…..You don’t have to give your name or email address [...][Continue Reading] [...]
[...] this week (was it only yesterday?) I noted the incredible response to the NOW on PBS show’s Sarah Palin’s qualifications to be VP (…. I also noted that for the time being PBS had no plans to change how it conducts online polls (ie, [...]