Computer software pioneer John McAfee speaks with reporters outside his hotel in Miami Beach, Florida. Reuters/Joe Skipper John McAfee is running for president as a member of the Libertarian Party. This is an op-ed he wrote and gave us permission to run.

On Saturday evening, Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics released the final iteration, of the Iowa Poll, which is widely regarded as the best in the state. On the Republican side, it showed Trump leading Ted Cruz by five percentage points, twenty-eight per cent to twenty-three per cent, with Marco Rubio in third place, at fifteen per cent. On the Democratic side, the poll showed Clinton leading Sanders by three percentage points: forty-five per cent to forty-two per cent.

New Yorker magazine, on January 31, averaged four polls, including the Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics, NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist, Public Policy Polling, and Gravis Marketing/One America News. On the Republican side, their surveys have shown Trump leading Cruz by five, seven, eight, and four points, respectively. On the Democratic side, they have shown Clinton leading Sanders by three, three, eight, and eleven points.

New Yorker stated: “The average of the four polls show Trump getting 30% per cent of the Republican vote, Cruz getting 24.5%, and Rubio getting fifteen 15%. On the Democratic side, the arithmetic shows Clinton at 48.5 per cent and Sanders at 42.3 per cent. So both Trump and Clinton are projected to win comfortably.”

None of the polls were remotely correct in any respect. Cruz got 27.6%, Trump got 24.3 and Rubio was almost neck in neck with Trump at 23.1%. Clinton and Sanders were so close that it's still difficult to call.

How have our polling mechanisms reached such a state of irrelevancy? Of what value are they now in the political process?

Gallup, the King of political polling for many years finally threw in the towel last year. One of the reasons given is that most people now use cellphones and many don't even have land lines. Land lines give pollsters the assurance that they have reached a single household and they feel that a person at home will be more apt to spend time talking about the details of various issues. At least that’s he theory.

Call me on my cell phone. Reuters/Regis Duvignau In reality. These cell phones have become more than mobile telephones. They are full fledged computers packaged to fit in the palm of your hand and they all have access to the Internet, the various clouds, news analysis sites, and most important: social media.

A Pew research study found that 60% of millennials get their news primarily from Facebook. This might be frightening to many, but it is the reality. And over 75% of Americans get the majority of their news directly from the Net. Television is an afterthought or simply background noise while people use their smart phones to find out what’s really going on.

If the average millennial wants to find out what people are feeling about any given subject, they are not going to look for a poll, they are going to access Reddit or some similar site and check the up votes for the topic they are interested in and read the comments. It’s in real time, and changes right before your eyes. Or they go to YouTube and find a relevant video and see both the positive votes and the negative votes for the video. Or they might simply post something on Facebook and check both the number of likes and the comments that readers make. It doesn't take long to get the pulse of any issue.

This is the world that pollsters are trying to tap into. It can't be done. In the modern world the influences on our opinions are so massive from the near infinite information sources of the Internet that even a satire news story that propagates on Facebook as the truth can raise the anger, or the sympathy, or the desire to take action of tens of millions of people overnight. What good is a snapshot poll is such a fluid world?

We have become a nation of wavering likes and dislikes. Every new information snippet finds its way into our subconscious and subtly changes us. We are unsure, at every moment what we will do until a choice physically presents itself.

The Internet underground has solved this problem by creating cumulative polls. These polls allow one person (one IP address) one vote for a candidate at any time they choose to vote. If the voter later changes their mind, then too bad. But others add to the the vote count and, oddly, over time, it turns out to be extremely accurate in representing final (or even intermediary) results.

Since I am running a mostly digital campaign and I have no small cred within the technical community, I appear in many of these polls.

The Internet is not perfect, and it is filled with characters with biases and strong opinions. For example, one polling site (undergroundpoliticalpolling.com) did not even include Marco Rubio, for, I expect personal reasons:

John McAfee

In spite of that, the relative positions of the four main party candidates reflected perfectly the Iowa results.

We are in a new age of digital technology. Unless the polling companies and the political pundits learn that a paradigm shift from television to the Internet has taken place there will be unexpected surprises come November.