Back in the 80s TV shows used 1-900 numbers as a way to poll audiences. As discussed in this article from 1987:
The ballots are cast by calling numbers with a 900 prefix; the opinion calls are counted rather than answered. To vote for the Denver Broncos, viewers dial one number. To vote for the New Jersey Giants, they dial another.
These weren’t toll-free calls; your next phone bill had a 50 cent or one dollar charge on it. But in those pre-internet days, some people were willing to fork over this small amount to have their voice heard.
These were clearly unscientific polls, as the article indicates:
The results of such tallies…are skewed because the people who respond are not randomly selected, but choose to make the call.
I think most people realized that these polls were for entertainment purposes only.
Anyway I bring this up because I remember one such poll that had a curious result. I can’t remember the exact question, but it might have been something like “Should Pete Rose be banned from the baseball Hall of Fame for gambling on baseball while he was a manager?” It may not have been that question specifically, but it wasn’t just ‘whose going to win the game?’; it was topical, controversial, with a little depth and complexity (at least, for a sports question). For some reason, they provided three 900 numbers instead of the usual two. The choices were “Yes”, “No”, and “I’m not sure”. When the results were announced, the “I’m not sure” number got something like 10-15% of the vote. The announcers made a joke about it, implying “what kind of an idiot spends a buck to say they aren’t sure?”, ha ha.
I think they completely missed the point. It was extremely telling that a significant number of people were conflicted on this issue, to the extent of picking up the phone, dialing a number, and spending a dollar, all just to say “you know, I really am not sure about this”. If you just didn’t care at all, you wouldn’t bother calling; instead, these were people who cared about the issue, but weren’t ready to come down on one side or the other. There is a difference between “I don’t know” and “I don’t care”.
