We discussed this a lot when we first released the Screen Name feature a few months ago.

Ultimately, we were (and still are) concerned that adding the extra time it would take for the participants to submit their screename, receive confirmation, and then reply to the actual question could take too much time and cause participants to miss the question entirely. In part because sending the confirmation over SMS can take 10+ seconds depending on their cell connection.

We didn’t want to take the risk. Above all, we want to make sure that the participants are able to quickly reply to poll questions and have their responses seen, heard and recorded.

Thanks for the suggestion though!