You would think the American Family Association would learn after their abortive (so to speak) gay marriage poll that (a) online polls are worthless, regardless of whether (b) people set out intentionally to distort them.
But, no. Now we have a presidential poll (Bush/Kerry/Nader). From the e-mail:
You help is requested in gaining the opinion of on-line voters to the following question. Whom do you favor for the next President of the United States – John Kerry, George W. Bush, or Ralph Nader?
Cast your vote. Forward to a friend. Help us feel the pulse of America.
At least I could see them using the (planned, targeted to their audience) results of the poll as a club against congressfolk (at least ones who are ignorant of statistics and surveys, or have constituents who are). But there’s eleventy-zillion polls out there on the presidential race, on an daily basis. What possible useful information could they get from folks taking this poll?
Beside, y’know, people’s political-preference-correllated e-mail addresses?
NOTE REGARDING USE OF INFORMATION: Periodically, in keeping with our Privacy Policy, we may notify you via e-mail of updates on matters of importance …
Ah.
(via Marc)
I got the same thing last night. I was fairly annoyed that they sent me an e-mail, so I clicked on the “go to this website to stop us from annoying you link).
Twenty minutes later the website still had not loaded. They must of been getting a lot of folks clicking on that link.
So I blocked the address and reported them to Spam Cop. What the heck…