The Difference Between Voting, Surveys, and Polling

In everyday translation, both "voting" and "polling" can be rendered as the same word in Chinese, but on closer inspection they are genuinely different things. Here is a simple way to define them:

Voting

A more formal, large-scale decision-making activity whose results are generally treated as official and authoritative. Think of an organization electing a new CEO: someone doesn't become CEO simply because their colleagues happen to like them. Behind the scenes there is usually a vetting process and a ballot before that person is recognized as the most capable candidate.

Surveys

A survey lets you ask multiple questions across a much wider range of question types. You can ask respondents to leave comments, email addresses, names, addresses, and other details, and you can capture their opinions through multiple-choice questions as well.

Polling

A more casual (informal) way to gather feedback, typically built around a single multiple-choice question. Participants choose from the answers you've defined in advance. You can restrict participants to a single answer, or allow them to select several.

The distinction between these three ways of expressing opinion usually comes down to what kind of information you're looking for. Here's a quick summary:

• If you want objective, general distribution data on a particular question: polling helps you quickly identify what your community prefers.
• If you need more subjective, detailed opinions: surveys help you collect many individual perspectives and tell a richer story about people's preferences.
• If you need to produce a formal, ratified result: voting relies on registration, and participants may need to provide their name and identity, or even verify by email or mobile phone, to cast a more rigorously validated ballot.

Technically, you can prevent duplicate voting based on different needs

Voting is a more serious voting system. We generally recommend requiring voters to verify their identity with an email address or mobile number before they cast their all-important ballot. Sometimes you can also ask voters to sign in via Facebook or Google as proof of identity, which lets them vote without needing a verification code.

Polling is simpler. Likewise, signing in through Facebook or Google already serves as identity verification in itself.

If you want your polling activity to collect responses even faster, there's another option: using the IP address as a marker. However, this cannot be considered one hundred percent accurate.