Shove that Poll Where the Sun Don’t Shine…

Having watched  the polls ruin the voter turnout in BC  during our last provincial election,  seeing that few  progressives bothered to vote at all, since the polls were showing a vast majority for the NDP..I am no fan of the damn things…

They have been  wrong many times, but,  right or wrong, they work an insidious magic on the populace that annoys me worse than a biased journalist (is there any other kind?) slavering on  right wing media..why?  Glad you asked…

Here’s a question for you..when you read the polls, or hear about them, what does that do to you, emotionally?  Does it make you want to get out there and vote to prop up a  losing side, does it make you throw your hands up in the air and say “Why bother?”

Does it make you complacent about voting, at all?  Do you see where I’m going with this?

Time was that  the media, just mostly newspapers back in the day, had a political bent  that was blatantly obvious to anyone who  looked, and papers were usually sold on the basis of that  philosophy..some still are, for instance, the  Toronto Star, surprisingly at least to me, endorsed Junior Trudeau…wha….?

Now  the go-to source for questionable  factoids is  ‘the polls’ and not just any, but those that a particular media source loves to quote, for  many reasons, most of them to do with their owner’s politics..so that the poll’s results’ are skewed from the start…I used to  enjoy  agreeing to be a part of  polls, until I noticed that the questions were worded in such a way that I would be seen to be supportive of things I despised, or if  I spoke out strongly for my political choice, the questions, which I was told initially would last about 15 minutes, would suddenly stop, I’d be thanked, and that was the end of my participation…they only wanted the responses they were looking for to prop up their ‘side’…..I quit falling for that..

Now, who knows  who/how/where they get their results, and frankly, I don’t care..I think polls should be outlawed for  at least the last 30 days of a campaign..people who are willing to vote are usually thin enough on the ground, and  polls do nothing to encourage  exercising your  right to vote; if anything, they discourage those who might otherwise skewer the  polling patterns…and isn’t that the point?

The  damage is considerable however if those too lazy to think for themselves  cannot be bothered to think critically about  the polls..and they become a self-fulfilling prophecy..all the polls start skewering one  way, whether or not that was the voter’s intention, and I know people just give up and say, why bother, if that is what is going to happen anyway?  My one vote won’t matter…and there you have it, multiply that sort of  cynicism by several hundred thousand, and  the excuses you hear for the next five years are rationalized…

Am I the only  voter out there who feels that the polling system in this country is  corrupted beyond redemption?