Understanding the difference between locking and stopping a poll is critical for avoiding game-day mishaps. When you lock a poll, it prevents any additional votes from being submitted while keeping the poll active, allowing you to review the results, announce a winner, display the final percentages on the video board, or continue showing results without new votes being counted.
When you stop a poll, it completely ends the poll session, resets all voting data back to zero, returns the activation to its holding state, and makes it impossible to retrieve or display those results again.
The key workflow is: always lock the poll first when voting is complete, review and announce your results, display them on the video board if needed, and only stop the poll after you've finished with that activation entirely and never need to see the results again.
If you accidentally stop the poll before locking it, you'll lose all the voting data. This is important if you want to have a big reveal moment because if you stop the poll instead of simply locking it when you want no one else to vote, you will get a 'no one has voted' message.