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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK
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Online population vote YES to AV
May 05, 2011
Today (Thursday 5 May) polling stations have opened across the UK to decide whether to change the electoral system from first-past-the-post (FPTP) to the alternative vote (AV) system, under which voters rank candidates in order of preference.
The majority of online searches relating to AV in the last four weeks have been very generic, with UK Internet users mostly searching for ‘alternative vote’ (17% of all search clicks) or ‘av’ (13% of all search clicks).
Internet users were also looking for clarification of how AV worked, with a number of information related search term variations occurring prominently in the above list including ‘what is av’, ‘av explained’ and ‘alternative voting explained’. With this in mind, it is not surprising that the top two websites to receive traffic from all AV-related searches were Wikipedia and BBC News. The official Electoral Commission website About My Vote ranked third, although it paid for almost all of its traffic.
What is interesting is that over the four weeks ending 30 April 2011 the search term ‘no to av’ was more popular than ‘yes to av’, and yet looking at the downstream data above, more visits went to the Yes To Fairer Votes website than the NOtoAV site. The latest polls would suggest that the British public will vote to keep FPTP in favour of AP, but visits to respective YES and NO campaign websites currently point in the opposite direction.
On 3 May visits to the YES campaign website were 8.4 times higher than visits to the NO campaign website. Clearly visits don’t equal votes, but there certainly has been a surge in interest online in the YES campaign, which could well be reflected in today’s voting.
Using Mosaic data we can dig a little deeper into the types of people that are visiting these websites. For both the YES and NO campaign websites, the Liberal Opinions group accounted for the most visits to each website. This group is characterised as young, well educated city dwellers – exactly the kind of people you might expect to take an interest in the AV issue.
The chart above shows the proportion of visits that Liberal Opinions contributed to both of the campaign websites. This highly active online group was responsible for 21% of all visits to the YES campaign website, but also 17% of visits to the NO website – in both cases punching above their weight relative to their representation both online and within the UK population.
As with our previous analysis of visits to political websites, the data shows that more educated groups are more likely to visit websites in general, regardless of their political affiliation. This makes it hard to judge how people are going to vote based on their online behaviour, but perhaps backs up the analysis which claims that the issue of voting reform is not of interest to the wider population. Time will tell if we get a new electoral system in the UK and adopt AV. Keep following us on Twitter for the latest political updates.
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Posted by Robin Goad at 08:44 AM
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In Categories 2010 General Election | Demographics | Mosaic lifestyle | Politics
AV is a system designed for polititions it has no benifit for us. seems to me that u can only vote yes online and forum tell u, you can only vote at poling stations if u want to vote no. well that in itself speaks for itself.
Posted by Anonymous | May 5, 2011 09:25 PM