Winol Poll

Winol, Winchester University’s student website, has been running a poll for the last week which asked viewers who they were planning to vote for in the general election next May.

It was first predicted that the Conservatives would win the poll, but a remarkable surge of Liberal Democrat votes during the last hour took the Lib Dems into victory by 44 votes.

The Liberal Democrat MP, Martin Todd, had sent an e-mail addressed to all Liberal Democrat supporters informing them of the student poll, and urging them to vote.

The e-mail explains that he believes ‘the Torries and Labour seem to more organised at getting there vote going on’. Besides the obvious spelling mistake, the e-mail was also titled as confidential and urgent.

It is described there will be a marginal seat election next year. As the election is going to be very close between the Conservative party and Liberal Democrats, even to the extend of just a few hundred votes, it is now crucial for the MP’s to get as many votes as possible.

It is believed that local MP’s are now targeting student voters to get as much support as possible.

Steve Brine, the conservative MP explains that the votes went up ‘very suspiciously in an hour’. He also stated that he did not believe ‘conservative votes has gone down, others had gone up’.

Patrick Davies, the local Labour MP, stated that ‘it’s very easy to fake the vote by persuading a limited number of people’ to vote. He seemed outraged about the news we had told him, and told us ‘I know through experience the Liberal Democrats are very good at all sorts of trickery’.

Martin Todd’s’ replied to this, ‘the truth is, Patrick should worry about policies, the reason why people are not voting, not voting for labour, in Winchester and nationally has nothing to do with what he may think is trickery’.

Trickery or not, the Liberal Democrats victory in the online poll seems to show that the Conservatives, and especially Labour, have a lot of catching up to do.