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Britain's top election expert "none the wiser" over divergent Brexit polls

By Estelle Shirbon

LONDON, May 25 (Reuters) - Britain's leading expert on elections said he was "none the wiser" on which polls, phone or online, were reaching more representative samples of the electorate ahead of a June 23 referendum on whether to remain in the European Union.

John Curtice said the divergence between phone polls, which give the "In" camp a comfortable lead, and online polls, which are tighter and suggest "Out" could win, was likely due to differences between the samples they were able to recruit.

However, he said there was insufficient evidence for him to say which set of polls, if either, was closer to the truth.

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In particular, Curtice probed a recent experiment by pollster YouGov (LSE: YOU.L - news) which suggested that phone polls may be skewed towards "Remain" because their samples included too many graduates, who are more likely to want to stay in the EU.

He said there was a very strong correlation between education levels and attitudes towards EU membership and most polls were failing to take this into account, but YouGov's unweighted data showed that their own experimental phone poll sample had included too few, not too many graduates.

"We have limited publicly available evidence on whether or not phone polls do or don't have too many graduates, which does I'm afraid leave the rest of us none the wiser," he said on Wednesday during a public event on EU referendum polling, hosted by parliament.

Curtice, a professor at Strathclyde University, is widely considered Britain's top expert in psephology, the scientific analysis of elections. He is president of the British Polling Council and ran the BBC's exit poll at the last general election in May 2015.

The referendum phone polls have been described as more reliable by some media commentators and financial market analysts, and the betting odds are pointing decisively to a victory for "In".

But the divergence between phone and online polls has nevertheless added to jitters in markets about the outcome of a vote which will have far-reaching consequences for politics, trade, defence, migration and diplomacy in Britain and beyond.

Three polls in the past 24 hours have continued to fit the pattern. Online polls from YouGov and ICM suggested the voters were evenly split, while a telephone poll from Survation gave the "Remain" campaign a six-point lead.

Appearing at the same event as Curtice, former YouGov president Peter Kellner said that despite having conducted online polls for 15 years and being convinced they were excellent in many contexts, he thought the telephone polls were likely to be the most accurate in the EU referendum campaign.

He said "Remain" was on course to win the referendum by 55 percent to 45 percent for "Leave", saying that an "In" vote by a any margin narrower than that would create very serious political difficulties for Prime Minister David Cameron, who has staked his career on Britain remaining in. (Editing by Guy Faulconbridge)