On Sun, 14 Oct 2001 12:02:02 -0400 (EDT), Steve <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Sun, 14 Oct 2001, Samuel W. Heywood wrote: >> Of course it is to everyone's advantage to have it appear that his >> own opinion, whatever it may be, reflects the opinion of the >> majority. > I have voted, without much regularity, over a period > of a couple of years at vote.com. Once I vote, and see > how others have voted, I do get the gratification of, > "Yes, people are smarter than I thought this time," or > "Man! How can people be so stupid!" ;-) I know the feeling. I have experienced the same many times myself. > In no case do I ever want it to "appear" that my vote > reflects the opinion of the majority. I want it to > appear that my vote reflects my opinion. Nothing more, > nothing less. You feel this way probably because you are not a politician and because you would be above doing anything dishonest in support of any politician. In a democracy the politician who can have the people believing that his opinions reflect those of the majority will win the election. Because of this, it is in the best interests of politicians to see to it that the public opinion polls are manipulated in their favor. >> Therefore the respondents might all feel tempted to vote >> more than once. ^^^? > I do not feel tempted to vote more than once. I am > therefore confident that there are others who also feel > no such "temptation." The only people who would not feel any such "temptation" are those who would never even think of doing anything dishonest to support a politician. Such persons are very few indeed, IMHO. I should not have said "all". I should have said "almost all respondents would feel tempted to vote more than once." >> Questions: Do these web pages designed for the purpose of collecting >> opinions from the public usually have some kind of mechanism to >> collect only one vote per IP number per each site access on the same >> site? > Yes. At vote.com, for instance, you can only vote > with JS enabled. The same code which allows you to > vote also disallows you from a revote. > I just checked by killing my browser, wiping my > cookies, and restarting the browser, and was able > to revote a question. This was dishonest of you to vote more than once. If it was just an experiment to see if you could get away with it, then you may plead that your dishonesty in this case is perhaps very mitigating and excusable <G>. >> Could anyone submit his own opinion multiple times for the same >> question on the same web site and by using the same computer during >> the same session and have each one of his votes counted as valid? > Not at vote.com. I don't know about others. >> If such is the case, then none of these kinds of surveys has any >> integrity. > Few surveys have any objective integrity anyway. > Most have the questions worded in subtle fasion to > steer the vote in the desired manner. Yes, and that is one of the best methods used by politicians to manipulate public opinion polls. <snip> All the best, Sam Heywood -- This mail was written by user of The Arachne Browser - http://arachne.cz/
