Many are called. Few do the choosing.

This page received a phone call yesterday from Ekos Research Associates. Had the Seattle Seahawks not already put away the St. Louis Rams, I may not have not decided to get off the couch and pick up the phone, having received a barrage of calls over the past week regarding Vision Vancouver's nomination meeting on September 20. That's the problem with tracking polls during a campaign, and that's why I don't bother tilting at those windmills: They only illustrate voting preferences among people who can be bothered to pick up in the phone, and in Ekos case, think they could actually win the $500 being offered for participating.

Ekos uses robo-calls with touch-tone responses. It's cheaper than hiring people for the public to hang up on, and more effective than a voice recognition program - those of us seen screaming our coordinates into our cellphones trying to get route information from TransLink can attest to that.

Dispensing with the usual demographic profiling, this page was asked three questions :

1. 'If a federal election were held tomorrow, which party would you vote for?' This page pressed 5 for the NDP, as there was no key to press for 'there can't be a federal election tomorrow because one has already been called for October 14.'

2. 'How likely are you to change your mind between now and the election on October 14?'. I pressed 5 for 'not at all'. Again, there was no key for 'I thought we were talking about some hypothetical election that takes place tomorrow'.

3. 'Do you have a second choice among the parties to vote for on October 14?' I pressed 6 for 'No second choice', as I don't believe Libby Davies will be caught training virtual puffins to defaecate on command, cracking jokes about listeriosis victims, or smoking a giant bong. Well, there's always YouTube.

If anything, the experience of being polled was as validating, and as easy as when I was pegged to fill out a ratings survey log for the Bureau of Broadcast Measurement about 25 years ago, and a year before I started subscribing to cable. Now, where's my five hundred dollars?