Well this is the story that will not die. There is a poll out, I found it because someone posted a link to me from the comments. I voted and overwhelmingly the results were negative for The Stranger. I found another poll on The Stranger's blog that was worded exactly the same, so I voted again thinking it was a different poll it wasn't. The results to the new poll reported that I had already voted, and now the results are very different.
The two pages are about 2 hours apart, note that the first poll has over 7600 vote the next one is only 378. They reset it, and because everyone who voted in the older poll is recorded we can not correct this distortion.
Update: Mystery Solved, The original poll was from Glenn Reynolds' Instapundit And it appears that The Stranger just cut and paste the question and answers. It must display the "You have already vote" message with your first click. I guess that The Stranger is owed an apology since I accused them of "rigging the poll" but instead this should be a lesson to them not to copy poll questions from other sites.
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2 comments:
Actually, the first poll was put up by Instapundit, who uses Pollcode regularly for his polls.
http://www.pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/archives2/026550.php
http://poll.pollcode.com/ZxJy_result?v
I suppose that he took the wording from The Stranger site, or they he, but either way they are actually two seperate polls by two different entities. Clearly, both are non-scientific as they must reflect the general biases of their respective readership.
I think the Stranger took their wording from mine, but there's no connection between the two polls. I don't know why their poll would show you as having already voted, unless they did it via the same pollhosting outfit I got and there's some sort of cookie or IP tracking issue.
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