What’s with the crappy polling, D.C. government?

In March, we took Mayor Vince Gray to task for an online survey he put out to gather public input on the 2012 D.C. budget. The problem with Gray’s attempt at measuring the public’s mood was that the method was as unscientific as you could get, and it came when public opinion mattered least — the budget had basically been finalized, scheduled to be turned over to the D.C. Council only a week after the poll was posted.

Now we’ve caught wind that D.C. Council Chair Kwame Brown ran his own poll, which was similarly unscientific and produced results that won’t likely be too helpful in helping the council amend and pass the budget. Below, we analyze the questions and the responses.

QUESTION 1: RESPONDENT BACKGROUND

Standard first question, right? The problem is that since you could pick more than one option — heck, you could be all four things if you so chose — it doesn’t really help narrow down exactly what type of folks are responding to the survey. Would someone who is both a resident and an activist be answering as the former, or the latter? How about a city employee who also owns a small business but doesn’t live in the city? Yeah, not so helpful.

QUESTION 2: WARD

Another standard question, and generally a useful one. Ward 7 led the charge with 30 percent of the responses, or 60 or so of the 200 people that submitted responses to the survey. (Coincidentally, Brown lives in Ward 7. He must have pestered the heck out of his neighbors to respond.) The obvious problem? Two-hundred respondents, the majority from Ward 7, isn’t a particularly representative sample.

QUESTION 3: DISTRICT GOVERNMENT SERVICES

To be expected, most people chose public safety and education as their most valued government services. (Somewhere within the D.C. Department of Public Works a government employee is thinking, “Yeah, you pick up your own trash, you bunch of ingrates.”)

QUESTION 4: GOVERNMENT PROGRAMS TO CUT OR SHRINK

Even though education ranked second in Question 3, it ranked first in terms of what city program residents felt could be eliminated or downsized for the sake of saving money. Well, there’s probably a certain nugget of honesty there — if the District didn’t have to pay for schools, we certainly would have a lot more money floating around, huh?

QUESTION 5: GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY

Probably the most useful of the five questions (well, the one on where respondents live was pretty key, too), and the most enlightening — notice how two of the options (“Fewer Government Cars and “Hire Competent Individuals”) directly reference the very scandals that have engulfed the two men responsible for crafting the budget. Yeah. Also noteworthy — “Reform Tax Structure” leads all responses, but Brown opposes Gray’s proposed tax increase on the District’s highest-earners. Way to respond to public opinion.