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Not only do they engage a user and encourage them to voice their opinion but they also encourage people to return regularly and see how their opinion compares with those of others.

Unfortunately however, simple online polls are not without their problems -- problems that render them far less useful than one might think.

Firstly, from a statistical perspective, they are flawed right from the start due to the self-selecting nature of the survey group. To offer a true representation of opinion within the general public, a polling needs to be done on a purely random basis -- online polls rarely are.

Then there's another problem with those polls which don't actually tell you how many people have voted.

A good example of this is the daily Prime News Poll.

Actually I've just taken a look at today's Prime News Poll and it appears that it presently has a whole bunch of problems (Screen capture).

The main problem with Prime's poll however is that it doesn't tell you how many people have voted so you have no idea how great the margin of error might be.

For example, I voted late in the day on one poll and found that my vote changed the poll results from 100%/0% to 50%/50%. Clearly, only two people had bothered to vote -- and I was one of them.

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On Saturday I voted again and, after doing the quite simple math, deduced that just over 100 votes had been cast.

Now, if some statistician would like to work out the margin of error associated with a sample of 100 people from a population of 4 million, I think it will become clear that a low-vote poll is more entertainment than information.

Perhaps the embarrassingly low numbers responding to Prime's poll is the reason that they don't display the vote count.

But Prime are not the only ones with polling problems.

Take Stuff's daily poll which can be found in the right-hand column of their front page.

Whoever wrote the code to display the results of this poll needs to go back to primary school and learn a little math.

I thought that this result was just an anomoly but when I checked earlier today, I see that they still can't get the figures to add up to 100% -- which is quite odd considering that there are only two options and one must be selected in order to vote.

But let's go back to that Prime TV poll for a moment...

Here are the results that were displayed earlier today. Well all the numbers *do* add up to 100 but I'm blowed if I can see how to make sense of these numbers.

Come to think of it -- I can't make sense of the question either!

Now I've been exchanging emails with Suzy Aiken and told her that I'd see whether Aardvark readers could boost the number of participants in the poll this week. Clearly there's little point in participating in the current poll since it makes no sense at all -- but I'll remind you tomorrow to go and cast your vote.

I guess the question that must be asked after these revelations is: are online polls just a waste of webspace or do they have some value?

Well at least they aren't a measure of the public's gullibility in the way that the $1-per-vote Holmes 0900 polls are.

Oh, and don't forget to participate in Aardvark's poll on this matter :-)

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