Polling... a thread. We join polling company websites like You Gov, create a profile, answer lots of questions presented to us. Therefore the polling companies can build up a detailed profile of us. They will know how you will answer certain questions before they ask them. 1/9

Polling companies then have two choices... manipulate their polls by just asking certain people how they’d vote or going through a randomisation process to make sure they pick a broad spread of people. 2/9

Any poll published should include their randomisation process. Explain how they picked these people to answer questions. All polling companies should have independent analysis of their randomisation process to ensure it’s fair. Otherwise the data is meaningless. 3/9

In fact when you look at the last few elections. 2015, 2017, Brexit, Trump. They got them all wrong. People even saying at the time, “Can we all just ignore polls now?” Yet each election cycle there is an obsession with polls. 4/9

All polls are collected online now because it’s cheaper to ask people online than call them or put bodies on a street in a town centre. With an increasingly partisan media paying for these polls what do the polling companies do? 5/9

If you ran a polling company you could also manipulate the results in favour of your chosen party. The best way to prove you didn’t would be independent analysis of your randomisation process. Randomisation process and fair analysis of it is key to a fair and accurate poll 6/9

So do polling companies run a fair poll with an independently verified randomisation process or do they manipulate the result by only asking some of their members based on the detailed online profile they have and get the “result” they and their paymasters want? 7/9

If it’s the first one then they’d publish their randomisation process and they would subject themselves to independent analysis of their randomisation process... so before you read the result of any poll, see if you can find any details of their randomisation process. 8/9

And when you try to find that information... you hit a problem, don’t you? The randomisation process isn’t there?

Which kind of leaves you with one conclusion, doesn’t it? 9/9