You've all seen them: "Non-scientific" polls that ask you to vote if you love the president or hate his policies or want to see gay marriage in Iraq or some other hot-button issue. They're non-scientific because anyone can vote and if they take the time to figure out how to delete cookies and/or mask their IP addresses, they can vote hundreds of times, even thousands. I often log into activist political sites and see everyone being urged to go vote in one and sway the vote their way.
The sites that set up such polls love them. They know they're utterly meaningless but they bring a lot of people to the site, if only to vote a few dozen times. They brag to advertisers about how many "hits" their site receives. I suspect some sites set up a poll for something like, "Should people be put to death for eating cheese?" and then they have folks log into the Cheese Lovers' chat rooms and post messages urging everyone to run over there and vote.
In any case, no one thinks they reflect any real sense of the public. In fact, on a given day, the same question can be asked in a dozen different online polls and "yes" will win by 90% at one site while "no" wins by 90% at another. Everyone knows they're a massive fraud.
So why is it that when I log onto a site that has one, I can't resist voting in it? And I feel a little better if the results show that my view is leading?