Thanks to an organized Republican effort, more than two-thirds of the respondents favored Bush's tax cuts, prompting an embarrassed DNC to remove the poll from its site. But you could go further than that. Online polls aren't even polls.
Online polls are actually elections, of a kind.
And elections, while a fine way to pick a president, are a decidedly poor way to measure public sentiment. Respondents are not randomly selected. Online polls are a direct descendent of newspaper and magazine straw polls, which were popular in the 19 th and early 20 th centuries. Other organizers of straw polls mailed ballots to people on a list of names. The most infamous of these took place in 1936 when Literary Digest sent 10 million presidential ballots to people, based on telephone directories and automobile registration lists.