Imagine that you have signed an on-line parliamentary petition. When you sign such a petition it is understood you fully agree with it. Since you cannot modify the petition’s wording in any way, the only other option then is to disagree or to abstain. Secondly, the polls usually use the ‘Agree – Disagree’ survey types, like about Brexit. One unintended consequence of that is that more and more often the polls are wrong, like in the USA elections in 2016. It happens because the polls indirectly by formulating bias questions prime the voters for who to vote. That stops some voters from voting because they think the result of the coming election is already clear, so why bother to vote. That was exactly the case with Brexit. Most people thought ‘well, I wouldn’t go voting for staying in Europe because the polls have already predicted the win for the remain side. So, they didn’t go voting and that’s why Brexit happened, considering a margin of about 2%, and which is a good example of how the polls themselves impact the result. If we had the electoral system which stimulate compromise and consensus, among others through the way how the political debates are carried out, this would not have happened.
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