The following is from the Americans Talk Issues Foundation (ATI) web site: http://www.publicinterestpolling.com We recommend a visit to the site and the book.

Alan F. Kay, author of LOCATING CONSENSUS FOR DEMOCRACY: A Ten-Year Experiment, co-founded a military research and development firm (1954-1963). Kay was the founder and CEO (1966-1979) of AuTex, Inc., a supplier of computerized communications networks to industries, including the first commercially available e-mail.

Beginning in 1978, Kay was an investor and board member in several start-up companies pioneering energy efficiency and pollution clean-up technologies. In 1987 he founded Americans Talk Issues, which established the science of public interest polling, and is now a project of The Alan F. Kay and Hazel Henderson Foundation for Social innovation. Kay received a PhD from Harvard University in 1952.

In his book, Locating Consensus for Democracy: A Ten_year U.S. Experiment, Alan Kay points out that political polls, supported by special interests, are fed to the public daily through mass media. These polls capture the political agenda and lead democracy astray. Both mainstream media and politicians ignore this disconnect between the true will of the electorate and its leaders.

Kay exposes how polling skews questions, analysis, and presentations to advance special interests. In a ten-year experiment, Kay's Americans Talk Issues Foundation employed careful scientific methods and balanced bi-partisan teams of experts to prove the value of "public interest polling."

The enlightening book provides the scrutiny that polling in the service of truly democratic government deserves. It explains how to tell a good poll from a bad poll and reveals the "dirty little secret of conventional polling."

"Public interest polling is not about elections, now largely and spectator sport, dominated by election horserace polls. It is about issues -- resolving community, regional, state, national and international problems. What is needed is governance that will help make the world, or our part of it, work with consensus support as easily realizable as a small town-meeting can find consensus should it wish to. We are now a nation of 260 million, a world of 6 billion. What worked for the Founding Fathers when we were a nation of 3 million no longer works today, and if the truth be told, not then either. But it is worse today.

ATI has found that the policies most wanted by people in issue after issue are startlingly at odds with the views of national leaders. Confronted repeatedly with credible and substantial evidence of the disconnect between their views on governance and the desires of the people, Gingrich, Bush (Sr.), Gore, Clinton, Perot, and virtually all of Congress and the mainstream news media -- just turn away. Each of these political leaders I've named specifically, and many others in the book, were approached in multiple ways with ATI survey results. None of them want to know that reasonable preferences of supermajorities (67 + percent) of Americans differ from the desires of one or another special interest that officials across the political spectrum routinely enact into law.

Politicians, pundits, and media editors believe that they can simply ignore poll results that differ from their understanding of political reality. Since the beginning of the republic they have been able to live comfortably with an unclear and, in hindsight, often distorted view of the public's view. That is until now. A consequence of unprecedented, massive and ubiquitous polling in 1998 on the Clinton sex scandals and impeachment has been that the stability and coherence of the public's views on these matters have become clear to all. Politicians, pundits, and editors for the first time have been forced to deal with poll findings that contravene their reality.