Do you ever get the feeling that the only reason we have elections is to find out if the polls were right?

Robert Orben (1927–2023) was an American comedy writer and speechwriter known for topical one-liners about politics and public life. This quip reflects the late-20th-century rise of scientific polling and media “horse-race” election coverage, in which pre-election surveys and punditry can seem to overshadow substantive debate. Orben’s humor often targets modern institutions’ tendency to treat measurement as reality—here, suggesting that elections have become a mere verification exercise for pollsters rather than a democratic decision-making process. The line circulated widely in quotation collections and political humor anthologies, typically attributed to Orben without detailed situational information about a specific performance or speech.

The joke satirizes a perceived inversion of democratic priorities: instead of polls serving elections, elections appear to serve polls. By framing voting as a way to “check” whether polling was accurate, Orben highlights how media narratives can reduce civic participation to spectator sport and statistical prediction. The humor depends on exaggeration, but it points to a real tension—when polling dominates coverage, candidates may chase numbers, journalists may report momentum rather than policy, and citizens may feel their role is secondary to expert forecasting. The line’s bite comes from implying that public opinion is treated as something to be measured and managed, not expressed and deliberated.