Credit goes to Mathias Daval of PHPVault for writing the original script PHPolls. He offers the script for use and modification as freeware as long as the copyright notice isn't removed. Without his work, I wouldn't have known where to begin.
Users can then vote, and cookies are used to restrict cheating.
It's also possible to view the poll results without voting. Unfortunately this is no longer the system I use here at web-goddess, but it's a good one to use if you don't have database access and you don't care about saving poll data. I spent some time on HotScripts looking at the different ways of doing it and decided that I would try to keep it as simple as possible - no database, no admin tool, just a lightweight little gadget that would be easy to configure. I finally found what I was looking for at Mathias Daval's PHPVault . Mathias's script PHPolls consists of a single PHP include that handles everything - generating the initial form, logging the votes, and displaying the results.