Polls are the first step in a pipeline that effectively turns money into votes. The better that pipeline functions, the worse our democracy functions. Let the only accurate poll be the election itself.
> I'll give you a gift card if you tell me how you're going to vote tomorrow
and:
> I want to represent you well, lets talk about what's important to you
I wouldn't propose we interfere with the latter. Or is the former truly useful for improving the quality of representation? It seems to me like it's really only good for improving ad targeting. Any representative worth their salt can find a way to get feedback from their constituency without requiring the people to participate in a cold call from a research company whose objectives are unknown.
Surfacing understanding of the electorates beliefs and desires is good but double edged. I think we can balance it out with yet other strategies and don't agree with GP's cynicism here but it's worth taking on directly.
True, but that's not the only party which can use this. The people themselves can use it to build better coalitions and to hold representatives accountable for acting against their will.
Expecting people to share their political leanings with any stranger who asks without encouraging them to make a friend/foe determination beforehand seems like it opens the playing field to interference just as well as it does to good faith feedback. Surely we can find a way to bias this interaction in the right direction somehow.
When I try to imagine the ideal case, it comes to me from somebody I know personally and see face-to-face regularly. Somebody who knows and trusts the candidate (perhaps transitively, for a hop or two). Somebody who wouldn't do the same at the behest of some billionaire looking to protect some shady project of theirs that's unfolding in my region.
Like, the information should flow back to leadership along a social graph that resembles the structure of the coalition we're building together. If not exactly peer to peer, from a transport perspective, then at least in a way that is authenticated by the presence of those peers.
I figure the tools of the successful revolutionary become the tools of the new government, so whatever it is it's gotta be useful for a small minority that wants to coordinate in the face of a sophisticated adversary, and then once it grows up it's gotta be useful for carrying out the bureaucratic business of a government. Unless it survives that transition with its trustworthiness intact, it won't be seen by the masses as trustworthy enough for the job. People just aren't that keen on trusting computers on the say-so of nerds like us, they need to see it succeed under stress.
So for starters I imagine an ocean of Sybil identities controlled by an enemy. Some of these will be trying to get info about your intentions so they can interfere (polling of one kind). Also you'll need to coordinate with comrades without making your entire trust graph known to all parties (polling of the other kind).
It'll never get to the point where coalitions are large if it doesn't function well when they're small, and at that phase you gotta be choosy about who you share info with because you're not yet a government but rather a threat to the existing one.
To answer your question, you volunteer locally so that you're involved in the process, or you encourage somebody that you trust to do so, or somebody they trust, etc... You validate it by doing it validly.
Also, yes, we can and should be volunteering locally. AND ALSO we can have independent statistical review.
It's just clearer communication to state your position plainly rather than bedazzling it with a bunch of disclaimers.
What? You’re stating this like it’s self-evident, but I don’t follow.
Wouldn't polling data be the place you'd start when it comes to making that decision?
We're already here and I think personal informantion, behaviors, etc collected from social media and corporations would be the bigger threat than the polling itself.
But that's a whole endeavor. Ignoring or lying when some research company wants to know about your political beliefs is a nice easy start.
Something about trying to deliberately distort the public about the likely status of an election also just feels icky to me. Likely to cause more harm than good.