A poll conducted by the Icelandic news and opinion blog Eyjan received almost 7,500 responses, nearly 70% of whom want parliament to reject the Icesave bill. This is about the same percentage of people who told a poll conducted by MMR for the newspaper Viðskiptablaðið that they wanted the bill defeated.
Out of a possible 7,454 who responded to the Eyjan poll, 5,188 – or 69.6% – said they wanted parliament to reject the Icesave bill. 2,144 said they wanted Iceland to approve the bill, and 122 had no opinion. That vast majority of those who responded were men (69.3%), and most respondents were from the Reykjavík area (45.5%).
Poll organizers were more or less satisfied with the technical side of how the poll was conducted, as software developed in Iceland was used to ensure both security and accuracy. Hákon Guðbjartsson, the director of the software team, told reporters he was disappointed that the turn out wasn’t in the tens of thousands, as he’d hoped. “But otherwise I’m satisfied,” he told reporters. “The results indicate that everything went as planned. People of all ages took part and there is no indication that any glitches came up. Everything [was] very positive.”
The Icesave bill is currently being worked out in the Finance Committee, after which it will be sent to the floor of parliament for a third and final debate, followed by the deciding vote. Parliament itself is almost evenly split on the issue, with a very thin majority in favor of passage.