He compares the 2,612 people who voted 40,000 times on 1,109 questions on the NHS for David Cameron against Barack Obama’s last use of the Google Moderator tool where 92,937 people voted 1.8 million times on 103,978 questions.
Thats not a fair comparison for a number of reasons, mainly Obama is President of the US not leader of the opposition, secondly his questions were allowed on any topic at all, not just one narrow topic and thirdly the US is a much bigger place.
Let’s compare some adjusted stats. The US has a population of 304,059,724 people with 74% of that being Internet users. The poor old UK has an estimated population of 61,399,118 and 79.4% of us are internet users. So the US internet using population is roughly 4.6 times as large.
Lets also look at the first time Obama used the Google Moderator tool in December 2008 in a pilot where again anyone could ask anything. After roughly 2 days the tool had apparently had 1 million votes by 20,000 people on 10,000 questions.
The conservative tool was open for roughly four days on the NHS so lets scale the first use of it by Obama tool to match our situation in terms of internet using population and number of days
| Obama | Cameron | |
| Votes | 434,782 | 40,000 |
| People | 8,695 | 2,612 |
| Questions | 4,347 | 1,109 |
Not that bad, considering that with Obama they could ask a question on anything at all. If you think about it policy falls into generally education, healthcare, crime and justice, defence and other (gross simplification I know) so you can divide Obama's figures by 5 leaving us with
| Obama | Cameron | |
| Votes | 86,956 | 40,000 |
| People | 1,739 | 2,612 |
| Questions | 869 | 1,109 |
Which seems a much better comparison and really just shows that Americans have so much time on their hands they can vote for 50 questions each on average whilst us Brits only have time to vote for 15 at a time!
Updated: With the final figures for the first time use from here
Great post
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