I Said Yes? I Meant No… (Bullitics in Campaigns and Elections Mag)
Bullitics.com was featured in Campaigns and Elections Magazine (June, 2008). Below an exerpt of the article.
I Said Yes? I Meant No…
By Joel Berg, Campaigns and Elections Magazine, June 2008
The polled sometimes have second thoughts after the pollster hangs up.
Those last-minute changes of heart—and their impact on elections—are the inspiration for Bullitics.com, a polling website that aims to capture the fluid nature of political views.
The site’s main feature is a tool asking people to numerically weight their answers in a pie chart or bar graph.
“I think a lot of people tend to be more relative thinkers,” says Ricardo Rossello, the site’s co-founder and a politically active technology entrepreneur in Washington, D.C. His father, Pedro Rossello, was once Puerto Rico’s governor.
At Bullitics, a respondent torn between Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain might, for example, register 50-percent support for each.
The weighting might change over time and pollsters could then spot emerging trends. A trial run of Bullitics during the Democratic primary in New Hampshire picked up late movement away from Obama, who was expected to win but didn’t.
The site is still in the testing phase. Rossello and his co-founder, Yosem Companys, ultimately hope to develop products that campaigns and businesses would pay to use, alongside free tools for bloggers and other activists to create their own online polls.
“This sort of product empowers people to become their own public-opinion pollsters,” Rossello says.