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What Happened With The Eviction Poll?

Freddie became the 9th Evictee last night in a shock result, but our main Poll, which pitted Freddie against Marcus, suggested the wrong outcome. So, let's take a look at the reason why...

Our home page Polls are usually very accurate and a good indicator of what will happen at the weekly evictions. However, at the time of Freddie's eviction, our Poll suggested that Marcus would go with 58% of the vote.

So, even if you allow for 5% inaccuracy, it should still have been Marcus going. But no internet Poll got it right as far as we're aware, and the reason for that is because public opinion changed dramatically towards the end of the week.

When our Poll first started on Tuesday after the nominees had been announced, it soon settled with Marcus on 61% to be evicted, and that figure held firm for ages. However, on Wednesday night the Channel 4 highlights show showed Marcus taking-on Bea (which boosted his popularity) and Freddie laughing at an upset Bea's comments (thereby decreasing his popularity).

As a consequence, the percentage for Marcus started to come down and the percentage for Freddie started to rise. But seeing as many thousands of people had already voted in our Poll, it didn't make a drastic difference, just knocking Freddie's percentage down by a few percent to the 58% mentioned above.

We have now analysed all the votes since Thursday morning though, and interestingly, we found that between then and the eviction taking place last night, for every Marcus vote there were 1.13 votes for Freddie to go.

To put it another way, if you discount the votes placed on Tuesday and Wednesday, for all the votes during that shorter 40-hour period, the actual split was 47% Marcus, 53% Freddie. Incredibly, that's pretty-much exactly what the result was in the actual public telephone vote, where Freddie was evicted with 53.61%.

So, there was undoubtedly a late swing in opinion, and that – in-part due to the fact that he had been overly-cocky recently – is the main reason that Freddie went, catching many fans out, not to mention the bookmakers in the process.

What this demonstrates is that generally, unless one of the contenders is a massive hate figure who's destined to go as soon as they're announced as a nominee, the majority of votes in the public vote are registered towards the end of the week, or on the day of the eviction.

Also, Polls can never be an absolute indicator of what will happen, because fans can't multiple-vote in (decent) internet Polls but they're free to do that in the public phone vote. Plus, a large number of the people who are happy to vote in a Poll for free, won't bother voting in the actual public vote.

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