Online polls from a newspaper are NOT fact....

[fireheart17]

This has come up on a website I go to quite frequently. It's the AdelaideNow website, which is the website for the Advertiser/Sunday Mail (local paper). We can post comments on there. EVERY time a hot-button issue comes up, people claim that "the majority according to an AdelaideNow poll" don't want this or that.

First of all, 3000 or so people does not make a majority (out of an alleged 1 million in the city and god knows how many outside of the city). Secondly, the polls do not close at a particular sample size. Finally, the polls do not represent the WHOLE community.

[Ghel]

Also, since the polls are online, there may be people from all over the world voting, so it's not necessarily local people voting, further skewing the results. I know there's websites where people post links to polls that they think are stupid or objectionable and ask their readers to vote, deliberately skewing the results to confound the poll creator.

[Ginger Tea]

with phone voting, you can vote as much as you like, least with cookies and other web things it is kinda one vote per user unless its poorly designed or flawed

[smileyeagle1021]

And of course, there is the problem that most moderates don't give a rats ass enough to vote in those online polls. So, you don't get a representative sample, you get the wingnuts who are going out and looking for polls to vote on.