Second opinion poll shows same six Senatorial leaders

18 October 2005

The same six candidates lead Elect Jersey 2005's second poll but in a slightly different order to the first poll.

The poll closed once 1,000 votes had been cast. Regrettably, a significant number of multiple votes were cast from the same computer addresses. These ranged from two votes from some computers to 324 votes from one computer. The first vote cast from each computer address is included in the result but not any multiple votes. In total 554 eligible votes were cast, compared with 438 votes in the first poll.

The poll was again launched with an e-mail to the 15,000 users of Jersey Post's e-mail service. As such it may not be representative of the electorate as a whole.

Alex Ohlsson, Co-Chairman of Elect Jersey 2005, commented, "It will be interesting to see how our results correlate with the actual results on Wednesday. By comparison with UK-based polls our sample size is large, but an internet poll is probably not representative of the population as a whole."

Notes on the methodology

The poll opened at 1pm on Thursday 13 October and ran until 1000 voters had participated.

It took place entirely online using a well-established third party survey product.

It was "self-selecting", meaning that those who took part did so by their own choice. They were not selected to represent a balanced demographic mix. Such an approach would have been beyond the resources of Elect Jersey 2005. The results must therefore be seen as an indicator of how the candidates are being received by the electorate, and not treated as a reliable prediction of the election result.

The sample size (554 individual respondents) represents a significant proportion of the number of registered voters (now over 54,000.) By comparison, MORI's most recent monthly "Political Monitor" survey (August 2005) polled 2047 respondents for the whole UK population.