The Scandal of Opinion Polls

It might seem a strange moment for a LibDem to say this, with our party striding forward in the polls, but as always we should treat them with a pinch of salt. Indeed, let’s remember that some countries ban opinion polls during the last weeks of a campaign, so that they don’t become a deciding factor in themselves.

But the real scandal isn’t that the polls suggest that voters are now seeing through Messrs Brown & Cameron. The real scandal is how the percentages of popular vote transfer into seats. I expect arm-chair psephologists have already gone to the BBC website and used their ‘seat calculator’. And here’s what it predicts on the basis of one of today’s opinion polls, the one which is least favourable to the LibDems. Remember that all present results put the three parties so close to each other that it is ‘within the margin of error’:

Conservative — 33% — 239 seats

Labour — 30% — 291 seats

LibDems — 29% — 91 seats

A single percentage difference between Labour and the LibDems and Labour could have 200 more seats and be the largest party even though they do not win the popular vote. These figures — and the calculations are similar with so many other polls — surely demonstrate once again how bad, how unfit for purpose our electoral system is. The irony is that the party most adamantly opposed to electoral reform is the party with so much to lose through it: the Conservatives might think they have a right to a mandate, but the voting system they support might well decide otherwise.