&gt;Also keep in mind that push polling is a thing. Every time you hear a statistic like &quot;only 27% of Americans oppose mass surveillance,&quot; expect that the question was whether the government should be able to tap your phone if it was the only possible way to prevent a terrorist attack that would kill you.<p>Yep, this is why so many polls are BS: the questions are worded in such a way to coerce people to answer a certain way, or options are left out.<p>It may not even be intentional; if you use the OKCupid dating site, they have thousands of questions you can answer so that it can match you up with people.  I think a lot of these questions (probably most) were actually submitted by users, and many times they have terrible choices.  For instance, there&#x27;s one question about dogs: it asks if you want to own a dog or not.  The choices are (I don&#x27;t have the exact Q in front of me here) &quot;yes, I do or would love to own a dog!&quot;, or &quot;No, I dislike dogs&quot;.  WTF?  If you pick the latter, it makes you look like you hate dogs.  But what if you like dogs just fine and are generally an animal-loving person, but you just don&#x27;t want to own and care for a dog?  I like horses well enough too, but that doesn&#x27;t mean I want to buy a horse farm and fill the barn with horses.  I think iguanas are cute, but I don&#x27;t really want one as a pet.  I think parrots are beautiful and interesting animals, but I really don&#x27;t want to live with all that squawking (plus I think they should be left in the wild).  But somehow because I don&#x27;t want to take care of a dog, I&#x27;m suddenly a dog-hater according to this poll question.<p>The way a poll question is designed really reflects a lot on the bias of the person writing the poll; the only way to mitigate it is to have every poll question thoroughly scrutinized by a diverse committee.  But they never are, they just run the poll, collect the data, and assume it to be gospel truth.