XBOX Live has been showing the Conventions and the debates, and as an interesting new development, they conduct polls during the broadcasts that you can answer using your game controller. Typically the answers have three options Yes/No/Not Sure or Obama/Romney/Not Sure. They have also asked users to provide some basic demographic data and conduct daily polls with about five questions, including presidential preference. The polls are designed and analyzed by YouGov, a big name pollster and market research company.

Today the results for yesterday's debate were made available and it was very positive for President Obama. YouGov claims that 35,000-40,000 users responded to each question, and that "the results are consistent across major demographics including age and gender".

The results don't have a topline, but instead split the users in 5 categories: Strong Obama, Leaning Obama, Undecided, Leaning Romney and Strong Romney. There were 4 questions: who won the debate, who was more truthful, and one for each candidate whether they had been specific enough about their plans. I won't discuss the Strong Obama and Leaning Obama categories, because they all went Obama's way by around 95% and 85-90% respectively

First of all, who won the debate: Obama won 52-17 with Undecideds, and Romney only scored 54% with the Leaning Romney crowd. Even with the Romney diehards he only scored 82%.

Similar numbers with the question "Who is more truthful?" Obama wins undecided 52-8, and this time Romney can't even convince his leaners by much, only winning 43-22, and scoring only 83% with Strong Romney, with most of the rest Unsure.

Major problems also for Romney with the question whether he has been specific enough about his plans, with an answer in the negative from a staggering 73% of Undecideds, 43% of Leaning Romney and even 17% of Strong Romney. Obama does far better with 56% of the Undecideds and even 31% of the Romney leaners saying he has been specific enough.

It is clear that Obama was playing well with undecideds, and that Romney has a hard time convincing them and that even a significant portion of his leaners have problems with him regarding trustworthiness and the specifics of his plans.

Of course this kind of interactive polling technology is still in it's infancy, which is probably one of the reasons why there are no topline numbers, but it is an interesting experiment and with smart TVs becoming more common and game consoles becoming entertainment centers, this could be mainstream in maybe 4 or quite likely in 8 years.