Peters calls for ban on election time polls

Winston Peters is repeating his call for a ban on political polls around election time.

It comes as Parliament's hosted a forum on polling practices and how polls performed at last year's election.

The New Zealand First leader has previously opposed polls being conducted close to the day of an election.

He wants them banned for the last four weeks of an election campaign claiming they distort the political process.

"There's plenty of academic evidence all round the world, that if the poll says a certain outcome is going to happen, then a lot of people, and it's a high percentage, actually react and vote on that result they saw in the poll," Mr Peters says.

It's thought news before the last election that New Zealand First was on the verge of getting back into Parliament convinced voters to get out and support Winston Peters.

But the executive director of the Association of Market Research Organisations, Rob Bree, says a badly reported poll is as damaging as a bad poll.

"There are some polls where there are large sample size, very precise calculations of the sample, there are some polls where someone just goes on line and asks 1000 people their opinion. That's not representative of the population base."

Rob Bree says the information coming back isn't that useful - but it's treated the same in the media as more stringent polling.

He wants to see an accord between the research industry, academics and the media over the issue.

Political scientist and polling expert Assistant Professor Rob Salmond says the predominant weakness in phone polling is that it doesn't sufficiently account for the likelihood of whether a person will actually vote.

"And the other weakness in phone polling is we don't account for people who have a mobile phone, but don't have a landline."

Mr Salmond says there are also weaknesses around online polling.

He says it's a new form which shows promise, but this country doesn't yet have the methodology right.

Mr Salmond says he doubts a ban on political polls at the end of an election campaign would be a good idea.

"Whether we want to bring legislative restrictions to bear on that , in my view is an unwieldy restriction on freedom of speech, and is not justified by the amount of damage that this does in New Zealand."

Electoral law expert Graeme Edgeler says it's not so much the polling that needs to be improved, but rather the way it's reported.

"Making sure that people understand what a margin of error is, and news organisations reporting their poll and completely ignoring everyone else's - those sorts of things would be good to sort out."

One survey in this country has suggested 30 percent of eligible voters didn't vote last year, because they felt the result was a foregone conclusion.

Photo: NZ Herald