Fisking silly polls

The Sunday Star Times has taken to using new pollster Horizon regularly. So far it has been with less than honest results.

Horizon’s main problem is their methodology, something that either the Sunday Star Times is willfully ignoring or deliberately encouraging in order to get results that suit them.

Their methodology is certainly exposed when a new blogger, Whowouddathort, shows just how out of step they are.

The Sunday Star Times does their credibility no amount of good when they descrie the flawed poll as “a major new poll”.

In the US there was this sort of carry on last year where Rasmussen was so far out that it ruined any meta poll of polls. Rasmussen was eventually taken out for a normal trend line, and compared with the normal, destroying their reputation in the meantime.

…polls conducted by the firm Rasmussen Reports — which released more than 100 surveys in the final three weeks of the campaign, including some commissioned under a subsidiary on behalf of Fox News — badly missed the margin in many states, and also exhibited a considerable bias toward Republican candidates.

Other polling firms, like SurveyUSA and Quinnipiac University, produced more reliable results in Senate and gubernatorial races. A firm that conducts surveys by Internet, YouGov, also performed relatively well.

There isn’t a regular poll, even Labour’s own pollster UMR Research,  in the country that has National even remotely close to 40% and certainly not a single pollster except for dodgy Horizon that has Winston Peters corrupt NZ First above 3 %. On that basis alone we can conclude that Horizon has a dodgy methodology and when we add their woefully poor history they can safely be discounted as no better than an online survey company.

Given Horizon’s to produce wildly different polls with no apparent obvious causality one must assume that they are on the fast track to becoming as maligned as Rasmussen is now.

The Sunday Star Times is likewise destroying its remaining, admittedly shallow, reputation as a reliable news source by publishing such rubbish.