1party4all

Unused as I am to comments on my blog site, I therefore felt obliged to respond to a request from one of these rare birds, to take a look at the website 1party4all which she has set up.

The site has the blurb “This website takes a different approach to democracy: instead of voting on parties and personalities, you can vote on specific policies. Called ‘direct’ or ‘pure’ democracy, it empowers the population to voice its opinion on specific policy issues, allowing "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" to be expressed.

Members are encouraged to look at the poll questions and vote regularly. The answers will form a large of the "personality" of this website. It hopes to reflect British public opinion without fear of favour. Fringe party issues of both "Right" and "Left" will be addressed, but the intention is to bring in people of all persuasions who are dissatisfied with the way the country is being run and think they have better ideas.”

And according to the biography of its founder 'Andromeda', it’s been set up by an ‘accountancy, political commentator’, so make of that what you will. She also has a blog site of her own, ‘The Voice of Reason’, where you can learn some of her personal views via her regular blogs.

Anyway, back to the 1party4all website.

Visitors are allowed to view existing polls in the “chamber of debate”, but you can only vote by becoming a member, or AAA Awarded member. There is also a comment box which you can complete, but have to be a member to get any accepted.

I navigated round the site, and everything appeared to work OK. The only observations I would have are:

• It is not clear how particular subjects are raised e.g. who is raising the topics. Obviously this and the wording of the question influence the results.

E.g. I have found this example of a real poll question, not from the 1party4all site illustrating how the wording of questions can influence the results.

1. In general, do you think a woman should have the right to choose to have an abortion? Yes - 67% No - 29%
2. In general, do you think the lives of unborn babies should be protected? Yes - 69% No - 19%

The wording of these questions produced conflicting results to essentially the same question, just put with a different slant and bias. It illustrates the importance of knowing how and who sets the questions.

• The polls do not show how many votes were required to achieve a particular result. If for example a question had 75% support, but there were only four votes (3 for and 1 against), then it’s ‘interesting’, but statistically meaningless and unrepresentative.

• Finally, they have a standard result, and a multiple vote result, which appears to be set as 50% for, and 50% against on nearly all the questions. It’s not immediately clear what the point of this is, and confuses the results. Do you look at the standard or the multi vote?
  
  

I understand why a new site would be forced to keep respondent numbers from being shown until it has enough voters/members to have statistical significance, but it is a weakness.

Conclusion, if the site takes off it could be an interesting indicator of public opinion on subjects of great debate. In the meantime it’s a political forum where people of a like mind can chat and vote on various subjects. See warning below:

Update Warning: The voting site originally reviewed seems to have quickly become defunct, and it appears was the vehicle of an 'Ex' British National Party member Claire Khaw (she has commented below), aka the eponymous 'Andromeda' who originally contacted me. Its fair to say that she holds strong views on a number of subjects that many would disagree with, and also may have converted to Islam.

I have removed all direct links from the post, but left it and her comment (with the link to her profile) up .... be aware that you follow them at your own discretion.  But free Speech is after all free speech so the post stays up as well as her comment.