Phil Spooner is right (‘Before the election dust settles…’, Postbag, 8 August) to make the case for Proportional Representation in parliamentary elections. 

It’s interesting – and ironic – to note that on July 4 the party that has long campaigned for PR gained, under first-past-the-post, the fairest proportion of seats! 

The LibDems won 11 per cent of the seats (72 MPs) for 12 per cent of total votes cast. 

But it is a highly unfair system when Labour, for example, get 63 per cent of MPs for just 34 per cent of total votes cast. This cannot be right.

In my view, to further strengthen democracy we need to do something else. 

An inquiry should be set up into opinion polls, in particular MRP projections. Misleadingly, these get labelled ‘polls’ in the media and in party publicity (as we saw in Salisbury).

MRPs are in fact models that use voter profiling to predict the probabilities of each party’s vote based on estimates of the types of voter living in a constituency.  

Possibilities for error are clearly rife and examples many (see, for example Dr Mark Pack, The Week In Polls, August 5).

Voters who see an MRP projection for their seat may well wrongly assume this is a traditional poll based on interviews with local people. 

It is not. Yet the MRP may exert a decisive influence on the way someone - especially a tactical voter - chooses to vote. 

The projection itself may therefore sway the final result.

Calling for such an inquiry, Tom Brake, Director of Unlock Democracy,  concludes (letter in The Times, July 25)  that until it reports, ‘the pollsters should refrain from publishing MRP polls, which in many cases appear to be nothing other than misinformation.’

Ian Curr

Pauls Dene, Salisbury

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