I suspect a plot!!

A friend of mine looked at me yesterday with something akin to pity when I told him I was predicting a 57% Yes vote today and asked if I was not afraid that I was going to look stupid on Friday morning? Not at all I told him, I may very well look stupid but I certainly won't feel it. How on earth can I come to such a conclusion he asked, so I will tell you what I told him, and I do it with the possibility of looking stupid, but I do it before the event so that whatever the result I can not be accused of making it up.

When the first serious polls began about this time last year they were giving the No campaign 20 to 22 per cent leads. I wrote a book on electoral systems six years ago that no one has any interest in and hasn't been published, but in it I explained and analysed seven electoral systems and explained and detailed the five systems that are used in the UK. As a result, I have detailed analysis of all the most recent elections. The first polls struck me as fantastic in that they were completely at odds with real election results within a Scottish context and I couldn't see how they could reflect Scottish opinion. I returned to my data and began watching the successive polls and I reached a conclusion round about last Christmas that the three Westminster parties were in collusion with the press and the polling organisations to inflate the No poll data and deflate the Yes.

Now I do not wish to appear as some kind of conspiracy theorist, but I reached that conclusion on my own, and fully accept that it may be completely wrong. However, I thought about it and concluded that they were distorting the figures by a factor of some ten percent. I will not bore you with a lot of figures but to explain my position, in 2011 the SNP polled 1,779336 votes and the combined votes of the three Westminster parties were 1,937,825. The SNP won 45.4% of the constituency vote and 44% of the regional vote whilst the three Westminster parties combined won 53.5% of the constituency vote and 43.9% of the regional. Thus in terms of votes the combined three Westminster parties only outpolled the SNP on its own by less than 200,000 votes, under 9% of the constituency vote, and actually less than the SNP's regional vote. So, where did a 20 point poll lead come from?

Now, those figures do not include the Greens for example, who are supporters of Yes. So, although this is a crude estimation, even on those figures above, how on earth can you conclude that the Scottish people have moved so far from the most recent empirical evidence to produce a 20 to 22 percent disparity. It simply does not make sense to me. As a result, I erred on the side of caution and assumed a 10% poll lead for Better Together, which, on the evidence of the last election is generous, and concluded that the remaining 10% was fraudulent. On that basis, when I made my 57% prediction on this blog, four polls had given Yes 47%, thus my 57% conclusion.

I am, if nothing else, a mine of useless information and I hope, if not instructive, at least amusing. We shall know tomorrow.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat