[IrishElk] Kinder Surprise

[irishelk]

This is an expanded form of a classic riddle, hopefully not known to everyone already! A mild Caveat earli$poiler.

Joy is responsible for conducting a political poll a few weeks before a national election in her country. However, the incumbent leader is tyrannical and people are afraid to say that they are voting against him. At first, Joy can't imagine how she will get honest answers out of people, but then she solves the problem with a very small amount of money. How?

[Balin]

Is anonymity of the responders relevant to the solution?
Does Joy spend the money? Donate it?
Is it relevant what form the money is in? If so, bills? Coins? Check? Digital? Cryptocurrency?

[irishelk]

Balin

Is anonymity of the responders relevant to the solution? In a sense, but she can still record individuals' responses to the poll.
Does Joy spend the money? No. Donate it? No.
Is it relevant what form the money is in? Yes. If so, bills? Coins? This. Check? Digital? Cryptocurrency?

[Doriana]

Flipping coins relevant?

[Sundowner]

Is the way of polling relevant? Did she interview people in the street? Call up people? have people fill in some online form or app?
Did Joy give the coin(s) to the people she interviewed? one coin to each of them? did the people at any time return the coin? did they do something else with the coin? were they told they can keep the coin?
Was the coin valid currency of the country?
Did it bear the image of the country's leader?

[irishelk]

Doriana

Flipping coins relevant? Yes! That was fast.


Sundowner

Is the way of polling relevant? Yesish. Did she interview people in the street? This might work, or at their homes. Call up people? No. have people fill in some online form or app? No.
Did Joy give the coin(s) to the people she interviewed? Yes. one coin to each of them? Yes. did the people at any time return the coin? Yes (so it could theoretically be just one coin). did they do something else with the coin? Yes. were they told they can keep the coin? Not relevantly.
Was the coin valid currency of the country? Actually, irr.
Did it bear the image of the country's leader? Irr.

[biograd]

Do the participants choose, based on the coin flip, whether to either answer a question about the incumbent leader, or else to answer a completely different, innocuous question? If so, is the innocuous question designed to give a 50-50 split of yes/no answers among the population? or to have a known, fixed answer (either yes or no)?

In either case, the point would be to give someone saying "no" to the question "do you support the incumbent leader" (or "yes" to the reverse) the perfectly plausible excuse of having in fact said "no" (or yes) to the other question. In the first case, the 25% of "yes" and 25% of "no" answers from the innocuous question are subtracted from the totals to give the percentages for the leader question, whereas in the other case, 50% is substracted from the total corresponding to the fixed answer.

[irishelk]

****************************SPOILER*****

Ooh, that was fast! Nice solve.

Biograd's system works, or Joy can say "Flip this coin and don't show me the result. If the coin is heads, tell me the name of the candidate you actually want in office, [Incumbent Tyrant] or [Challenger]. If it's tails, just say [Challenger]." That way, they have the plausible deniability that they are just saying the challenger's name because they have to. Then, as with the known-answer situation above, you would subtract 50% of the total answers from the challenger to get an accurate sample.