On our front page today you may have seen a story about results of a Web poll question concerning finances at City Hall.

I remind everyone that it’s an unscientific poll, and based purely on the results of folks who chose to answer the poll question on our Web site, gobogalusa.com.

People who don’t agree with the answer will point that out right away: “It’s unscientific, and thus meaningless,” they might say.

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But is it meaningless? And just what is an “unscientific” poll?

To answer this, let’s start by defining what a “scientific” poll is.

In a nutshell, a scientific poll follows a particular method of randomly selecting a certain number of a population to answer a specific question. There are different ways of going about it, but typically, the more people interviewed for the poll, the lower the margin of error becomes. A good scientific poll will have a low margin of error, like 3 percent or so.

According to a group called the National Council on Public Polls: “One major distinguishing difference between scientific and unscientific polls is who picks the respondents for the survey. In a scientific poll, the pollster identifies and seeks out the people to be interviewed. In an unscientific poll, the respondents usually ‘volunteer’ their opinions, selecting themselves for the poll.”

As the Associated Press Stylebook tells us, online polls where the participants volunteer to take part really don’t carry any weight when it comes to an accurate portrayal of public opinion: “Balloting via Web sites, cell phone text messaging or calls to 900 numbers. These too are self-selected samples, and results are subject to manipulation via blog and e-mail campaigns and other methods. If such unscientific pseudo-polls are reported for entertainment value, they must never be portrayed as accurately reflecting public opinion and their failings must be highlighted.”

So, is the poll depicted on the front page of today’s newspaper an accurate reflection of public opinion?

No.

But there are definitely some people, including city leaders, who agree with the top answer. So I don’t think it would be fair to call the results of the poll meaningless.

In any event, it the poll is what it is: A Web poll generated by readers of The Daily News, which can be just about anybody.

And here’s the great thing about the whole thing: If you really want to vote on something concerning our latest Web poll, it easy enough to do in just a few mouse clicks. And if you feel up to it, just hop on another computer, and you can vote again.

Jacob Brooks is managing editor of The Daily News and can be reached at 732-2565 or jacob.brooks@wickcommunications.com.