Reality check request

[firecat]

A steering committee for a weekly event polled the membership asking whether it should make a policy change about who can attend the event. This was the result of the poll:

No, I do not want to change the policy - 30%
Yes, I would like to change the policy - 41%
Yes, I would like to change the policy, but only for one meeting a month - 18%
Yes, I would like to change the policy, but retain the current policy once a month - 27%

These poll results were described as "The community was fairly evenly split about this idea" and the decision of the committee was "For the time being we will not be making changes."

These figures add up to more than 100%, so it's hard to gauge, but it seems to me that the membership is not in fact "fairly evenly split" at all. What I see is that at least 70% of the votes are in favor of changing the policy.

However, I'm strongly in favor of changing the policy, so I am biased. What do you think?

Comments

[redbird]

It seems pretty clear that either a majority of the steering committee, or the person who wrote the report, is opposed to the change, but that's all that's clear to me.

Not only is it unclear whether that reported > 100% includes everyone polled, but I don't know whether someone who wanted to change the policy for some but not all of the meetings would choose both 2 and 3 or 4, or only 3 or 4.

One possibility is that half the members definitely want to change things, with almost all of that half wanting to try a change for only some of the meetings; 30% definitely want no change; and the rest either don't care, or didn't respond for some other reason (like being busy when the poll arrived and then forgetting about it until they got the results). Or that everyone voted, or that only a quarter of the membership did.

I assume you saw the original poll, and know whether there was an "I don't know/undecided" option. Do you know what percentage of the members answered at a;;?

As eagle suggested, this could well be voting shenanigans, designed to produce results that look like whatever the organizers wanted. The same numbers could have been presented by someone else as "86% of the members want a change" or as "most of the members like the current policy and want to keep it for at least 1/4 of our meetings."

[firecat]

There was no "undecided" option and I don't know what proportion of the members answered the poll. Thanks for your comments.