[Bigbrotherin]

Are online polls an accurate way of judging who is going to win/be evicted?
Consider this, MOST people like / dislike more than one candidate and may vote more than once for each! The polls only allow you to vote once for one person. So let's say BB had 10 voters and each could vote an unlimited number of times the votes could look like this:

Voter 1 = 1, Voter 2 = 2, Voter 3 =3 and Voter 4 = 4
Bob = example housemate, Viv = example housemate, Dawn = example housemate

Housemate | Votes
Bob | Voter 1, Voter 1 again, Voter 1 again, Voter 3
Viv | Voter 1, Voter 2, Voter 3
Dawn | Voter 4
^

As you can see Bob wins because he has more votes for him, but 3 of his votes were from the same person. Only 2 people voted for him. Whereas Viv had all 3 voters vote for her, but because they only voted once, she lost. If this was a poll, then Viv would have won and not Bob, meaning that the poll would have been an inaccurate judger of votes!

ALSO consider that most voters don't vote in online polls as online poll voters make up a VERY small fraction of voters infact, we probably make up less than 0.001%. So lets say only voter 4 voted online and the other 3 only voted in the final then Dawn would win, despite only having 1 vote!

Another thing to consider is that while allot voting demographics are covered on our forums, not all of them are. Most people who post on a forum are going to have similar views to each other. Your not gonna have many people who will consistently post on a forum where members disagree with what they say, some will, bust most won't.

and the last thing I can think of to bare in mind is that usually, the percentage that a housemate wins by or is evicted by is different to the percent that they win/loose by in online polls. E.g. if a housemate wins by 36% in an online poll, they may win on the show by 66% meaning that 30% of the public were not reflected in the online polls or that that 30% voted differently in the online polls.

So bearing all this in mind, are online polls really are an accurate judge of housemate popularty/unpopularity?


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