Predictions with regards to who would win the Spanish, Israeli and U.K. elections were way off.

During the most recent elections in the United Kingdom, Spain and Israel, pollsters called the outcomes quite firmly and yet they were incredibly wrong and the belief is that the same mistakes may be headed to the U.S. due to mobile technology and the lack of understanding of the Millennial lifestyle.

Still, American pollsters are trying their hardest to avoid those mistakes during the 2016 campaign.

According to the president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, Mollyann Brodie, who is also responsible for overseeing polling at the Kaiser Family Foundation, “There are a lot of people working hard to make sure similar mis-steps don’t happen here.” However, she and other experts in the field – agree that the pollsters across the United States are currently up against some extremely complicated challenges with regards to their methodologies. These challenges are about as tough as they’ve been since mobile technology first hit the mainstream.

Millennials use their mobile technology to screen calls, throwing off the balance of understanding of voters.

People in the Millennial generation don’t feel the urgency to pick up the phone when it rings, as has been the case in previous generations. When their mobile technology device rings, they use caller-ID to see who is on the other end, and they feel no obligation to pick up when it’s someone they don’t know, don’t want to talk to, or when they’re simply too busy to pick up.

This, combined with the declining accuracy of the “likely voter” models and swindling budgets have caused sample sizes to shrink dramatically. For this reason, the polls, this year, are facing considerable criticism. There is considerable risk that the predictions in the United States are as inaccurate as they have been elsewhere around the world, and that pollsters could find themselves feeling rather red-faced when the true outcomes are revealed.

A prime example of this challenge occurred when the chief strategist for Hillary Clinton, Joel Beneson tweeted “Seriously CNN?” in response to a poll result the network released, which showed the former secretary of state falling behind Bernie Sanders in Iowa (43-51). The reason for the lack of faith in the figures is that it was discovered that the sample used by CNN was made up primarily of men, and consisted of only slightly over 300 people – which is barely representative of a general population.

Report highlights the growing power of mobile payments

The popularity of mobile payments is growing in the United Kingdom and the United States. Citigroup and the Imperial College of London have released a new report shows that consumers in many countries are beginning to favor mobile payments when they shop digitally. This is particularly true in the U.S. and the UK, as more consumers are beginning to use their mobile devices to purchase products online. As such, they are becoming increasingly reliant on new payment services that allow them to make purchases online and in physical stores.

Consumer attitudes are affecting the adoption of new payment services

While more consumers have been opting to use their mobile devices to make payments, adoption of mobile commerce has been slow in 2015 overall. Consumer attitudes kept many people from making use of mobile payments services and these attitudes were swayed by security concerns. Many believe that their personal information is at risk when they use new payment platforms, which leads them to avoid mobile payments altogether. the report also suggests that there is a culture barrier preventing the widespread adoption of mobile payments.

UK banks are finding success with their own payment platforms

Banks in the United Kingdom have reported a surge in the adoption of new mobile payments service over the past few years. Barclays has its own mobile platform, called Pingit, which now accounts for 1 million transactions as of January of this year. This is an increase over the 100,000 transactions it had been responsible for only one year ago. Payment services in the U.S. have seen similar growth, especially due to the availability of new services like Apple Pay and Android Pay.

Consumers want more security from their mobile payments services

The mobile payments sector is still considered quite young. As such, there is room for growth in its various aspects. For consumers, security remains one of the most important priorities. If services cannot protect their financial information, consumers are unlikely to make use of them. These consumers also want more value added to the mobile payments services they are interested in. This may be accomplished through stronger support for loyalty programs.