DOuglas Alexander can’t even run elections on his own website without disenfranchising some.
His site at http://www.douglasalexander.org.uk/home has an option on the left hand side of the screen marked “Poll” with an option to vote for one of two sample poll answers. (this facility has obviously not been used by wee Dougie thus far). Apparently the voting between the two options is 49% for answer 1, 50% for answer 2. GIven that there is no none of the above box, is there any explanation for the missing 1% of votes? Perhaps Douglas has arranged the e-poll to prevent some votes being cast on a purely hypothetical question (with no substantive content) for partisan purposes too.
PS Can anyone tell me how to take a screenshot of a webpage that could be uploaded as an image file to illustrate this?
ETA with thanks to
![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
and
for technical advice and to
who uploaded the screenshot here. An excerpt of the image from that capture reveals
I’ve no idea what OS you use; I just grabbed the thing with the GIMP’s screenshotting wossname, download, crop and edit to suit
Oh, and being uncharacteristically generous, it is possible he’s suffering from a genuine rounding error here.
Many thanks for the link and the advice.
I also suspect there is a rounding problem, but the irony is quite amusing…
Hit “Print Screen”, go to a image manipulating app and paste. Then save it, upload it to photobucket (or other site of your choice) and link to it.
I strongly suspect that his site is rounding badly.
Many thanks. As I said to perlmonger I also suspect there is a rounding problem, but the irony is quite amusing
Rounding percentages can be pernicious. I have probably told the story of someone I used to know who worked for a while on the listening figures of a radio channel, to be published as percentages which she was told had to be round integral values adding up to 100. Of course, this often can’t be done fairly, so she exploited the opportunity to boost those shows she liked and downgrade those she didn’t. Nobody spotted the manipulation, the innumerate idiots.
But in this case where there’s only two figures, if conventional rounding rules are applied they should add to 100.