The AV referendum question

From the UK polling report blog by Anthony Wells:

Last week the government published the wording that will be used in the AV referendum: “Do you want the United Kingdom to adopt the ‘alternative vote’ system instead of the current ‘first past the post’ system for electing Members of Parliament to the House of Commons?”

In the fullness of time, the polling questions we ask on how people will vote in the referendum will naturally switch over to match the actual question that will be used, but in the meantime I thought it might be interesting to see if the actual wording made any difference in this case, so on the YouGov poll for Sunday we put the question we have used in the past to one half of the sample, and a question including the actual referendum wording to the other half.

The result – almost identical results:

The standard question was AV 41%, FPTP 35%, Wouldn’t vote 5%, Don’t know 20%.
The question with the referendum wording was AV 40%, FPTP 35%, Wouldn’t vote 6%, Don’t know 19%.