I understand your desire to create an interactive experience and to fill newspaper space that might have once been saved for original political cartoons, good local reporting, or useful statistics. However, I take issue with the choice to devote a corner of The Baltimore Sun's "Commentary" page to the results of "non-scientific" online polls. Such polls are not representative of the larger population, rendering their results useless. The poll results serve only to mislead your readership.

If The Baltimore Sun is actually committed to providing "Light for All," you would do well to instead publish figures that are meaningful. Journalists may pleasure in emphasizing anecdotes at the expense of numbers, and the merits of that approach are debatable. But it is entirely irresponsible to publish figures that appeal exclusively to the reader's ignorance of statistics and selection bias.

Jacob Mallott, Baltimore