Posts filed under Politics (194)

Kiwiblog’s David Farrar has nominated 3 News for the most misleading story of the week in their reporting of a political poll because their story does not mention that the poll was only a sample of Maori voters, not a sample of all voters:

“Labour most popular party in new poll…

Labour leader Phil Goff will be clinging to the unexpected results of a new poll in which his party has picked up twice as much support as National.

But he is well behind John Key in the preferred prime minister stakes, according to the TVNZ Marae Investigates Digipoll, released today.

Labour’s on 38.4 percent support in the poll, followed by the Maori Party on 22.2 percent, while National’s on just 16.4 percent. That is in stark contrast to other media polls, which put National above 50 percent support, with Labour rating at 30 percent or less, and the Maori Party on around one percent support.

…The TVNZ poll interviewed 1002 respondents between August 19 and September 20, and has a margin of error of +/- 3.1 percent.”

The original press release from TVNZ does state this very clearly:

Full release of Digipoll Maori Voter Survey… The TVNZ Marae Investigates Digipoll is one the most established voter polls in NZ and often the only one to survey Maori voters in an election year.

In a further 3 News article they discuss a different poll and say that “the poll differs greatly to one released by TVNZ’s Marae Investigates earlier today” without explanation for the difference.

UPDATE: 3 News have now updated the headline to: “Labour most popular party among Maori” and added “The TVNZ Marae Investigates Digipoll surveyed Maori listed on both the general and Maori electoral rolls.”

3 News’ Chief Editor James Murray apologised on Kiwiblog:

“Got to put our hands up to a genuine mistake there. This was a story from our wire service, and we didn’t do our due diligence in fact-checking it.

We absolutely understand the importance of getting this right, and the story has now been corrected. My team have been told to be extra vigilant on poll stories in future and NZN have been informed of the error.

Apologies for anyone who may have been misled by this mistake.”

Which do you think is more likely to kill you? A toaster or Islamic extremist terrorism? The answer may surprise you.

Security guru Bruce Schneier has written a piece entitled Terrorism in the U.S. Since 9/11. As a critic of the excesses of the United States of America’s response to the events of September 11, 2001, Schneier compares the spending on anti-terrorism with the number of lives saved.

In my opinion, the most interesting part was where he refers to a Comparison of Annual Fatality Risks published deep inside Hardly Existential: Terrorism as a Hazard to Human Life by John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart:

You have a 1 in 1,500,000 chance of being killed by a home appliance every year in the United States, but only a 1 in 3,500,000 chance of being killed by terrorism.

David Farrar at Kiwiblog provides some new local examples and discussion of question-wording effects in surveys, including the gender/pay issue and same sex marriage.

“With poll questions there is rarely a clearly “right” or “wrong” question. There can be a dozen different ways to ask a question. The important thing is that the poll results make it very clear the exact question that was asked, and that reporting of the results does the same.”

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New Zealanders will vote in a referendum in November asking whether they want to change the current voting system used for deciding the makeup of Parliament.

Dr Geoffrey Pritchard and Dr Mark C. Wilson, members of the Centre for Mathematical Social Science at the University of Auckland, have created a simulator intended to voters to compare the 5 proposed electoral systems in a quantitative way, by allowing them to compute quickly, for a given polling scenario, the party seat distribution in Parliament under each system.

You can try it out by going to http://cmss.auckland.ac.nz/2011-referendum-simulator/ and they would appreciate any feedback on how to improve it.

It is written in Javascript and the source code is publicly available. The assumptions made are detailed in the FAQ.

They hope that this will allow a better understanding of the consequences of adopting any of these systems, and complement the qualitative information given by the Electoral Commission.