How to create an online poll (and get people to vote)

A poll is a survey with one question, which makes it the easiest thing to publish and the easiest to get wrong. There is nowhere to hide a badly written question when it is the only one there.

Ask one thing, plainly

The strength of a poll is that anyone can answer it in a few seconds. Anything that needs a paragraph of setup is not a poll — it is a survey wearing a poll's clothes, and the response rate will tell you so.

Make the options cover reality

Most poll results are distorted not by the question but by the options. If someone's real answer is not there, they either pick the closest wrong thing or leave — and both outcomes corrupt the result.

• Cover the plausible answers, not just the ones you are hoping for.
• Add "Other" with a text box when you cannot be sure the list is complete.
• Keep options mutually exclusive — overlapping choices split the vote arbitrarily.
• Order them neutrally. Alphabetical or logical order beats putting your preferred answer first.

Decide whether one person may vote twice

For a light-hearted poll it rarely matters. For anything that informs a decision it matters a lot, because the easiest poll to skew is one with no protection at all. Rate limiting and bot protection keep a public poll's results defensible without asking voters to sign in.

Show results — or deliberately do not

Revealing the running tally boosts participation, because people like seeing where they stand. It also biases later votes toward the leader. If the poll is for engagement, show results. If it is to find out what people actually think, hide them until it closes.

Put it where the audience already is

Polls live or die on placement. Embedded in a page people are already reading, or linked in a message they already opened, a poll gets responses; posted somewhere and left to be discovered, it does not. Keep it open for a defined window and say when it closes — an open-ended poll quietly collects votes forever and never gets acted on.