Continuing with our theme of news sources that tell us what they think we want to hear: I think Internet news polls are just about worthless. In fact, they're less than worthless. Not only do they attract the most passionate and unrepresentative voters (many of whom can figure out how to vote multiple times) but they wrongly convince people of trends that may not exist. They're just a cheap scam to get you onto the website and to keep you there a little longer, clicking away.
All that said, I had to laugh out loud at the one I just noticed on the CNN site (on Lou Dobbs' page). Kind of a lopsided vote there…and of course, it's all these people voting in a completely unverifiable, easy-to-rig manner to say that they want voting to be more verifiable. You kind of wonder what's on the mind of those who voted against paper receipts. The only semi-logical argument I've ever heard against them is that, supposedly, receipts might make it easy for people to sell their vote, in that they could then prove to the person paying them that they'd voted as ordered. The problem with that argument is that absentee ballots make vote-selling even easier and no one is against them.
Nothing annoyed me more about the 2000 election than all the Bush partisans trying to pretend that the irregularities in that election were a minor detail and telling Democrats to "get over it." It was like some of them were afraid that any expressed concern about more accurate voting would further taint their boy's "victory." I have never been convinced that a different guy would have wound up in the White House if every voter who was qualified to vote and wanted to vote had done so and been tallied as per their intent. But I was sure disappointed that I never heard a prominent Republican say that they were uncomfortable with the way their guy got in.