With a soft fork it's very clear that the version with the most mining power carries the day. The block gas limit voting feature for the current, vulnerable soft fork is very clever, because it allows all the nodes to see if the fork has support from the miners, and if so causes them all to follow along. It avoids a long messy period of coming to consensus, where people who don't take the fork are mining blocks that their peers aren't accepting and dealing with constant reorgs.

How would this work for a hard fork? In a hard fork, we can't look at the total hash power for and against and agree who would win in an actual fight. If we actually played the game all the way out, answering the "which is the real Ethereum" question would involve a lot of decisions made by exchanges, individual users, semi-centralized Dapp operators, and potentially trademark courts if anyone actually owns a trademark on the "Ethereum" name. The result of such a situation is hard to foresee, especially in code. So Ethereum implementations won't be able to look on the chain and see whether the hard fork has enough support before actually taking it.

In light of that, is there going to be some sort of formal poll or survey of the community? Something to illustrate to whoever's backing the less real fork that they are in fact backing the less real fork, before the actual fork?