While everybody that blogs really likes to get comments to find out what people think of your writing, a look at the statistics you get from the plugins I looked at last time, will tell you most folks do not say much. In fact, most of them do not say anything at all. But there are other ways to find out what they think. One of those ways is to use a poll. There are a lot of polling agencies out there, but if you can’t afford to hire AC Nielsen or Gallup, you can use one of these plugins to at least get an idea.

Getting Opinions

WP-Polls uses AJAX to add polls to your blog. It actually gives you two plugins, one for a sidebar widget if you want to place polls there, the other to actually make the polls work. The plugin gives you another section on your dashboard menu, where you can create your polls and control how they show up on your site.

Adding polls is pretty straight forward. Type your question into the text field, then the answers you want them to choose from in the answer fields. You have to have 2 answers, but can easily have more than that. And you can allow the reader to pick more than one choice at a time, up to the number of answers in the poll. And you have the choice of having the poll expire at a set time in the future, very handy if you use polls frequently. You can place polls in the sidebar widget, or on any page or post using a shortcode.

On the Options page, you control how the polls are presented, from the color of the and style of the graph bar, to the order in which answers are presented. You also set who exactly can vote, and how the plugin determines if someone has voted before on a poll. It also allows you to set up a page for the results of all of your polls, showing either the finished, open, or both types. The final option you can pick is what will be displayed in the sidebar widget if you use it. If you want multiple polls in the sidebar, you need to choose which ones will appear in the widget itself, otherwise you can control which will be there from either the option page or the widget controls.

Then there is the page of Poll Templates. It has text boxes where you can control the look of the polls, the poll results, and the poll archive page, and includes a very large number of variables that you can use for doing that. This is incredibly handy if you want to make your polls and/or results stand out from the rest of your blog and are comfortable tinkering with html and/or CSS. Or you can completely ignore it if you want to, the supplied styles work fairly well.

Finally, there is the Uninstall page. It goes into your database and removes all the information that the plugin has placed there, including both poll data and tables the plugin needed to work. This is very nice, helping keep your database cleaned up if you decide you do not want the plugin. It would be nice if more plugin developers would do this kind of thing.

PollDaddy Polls has no options at all. At least not on your blog. What it does is allow you to place polls you create on PollDaddy.com (ran by the same folks that own WordPress) on a page of your blog using a shortcode. This means that you must have an account on PollDaddy, but they are free and easy to set up.

Creating polls is also easy, with PollDaddy allowing you to use any number of answers, and even letting you use a variety of media as possible answers. They also give you multiple language choices, let you set it so that the poll takers can add answers, and have a variety of different looks you can use for your poll. Or you can create your own custom styles using their website if you want to make it fit into your site better.

Setting up a poll on PollDaddy is quite easy, with a large number of options available for making it personalized. You only get the percentage of people that answered a question unless you pay for membership at PollDaddy, but that is probably sufficient for most of what you will want to know from your readers. And it has the benefit of not using your server resources.

MicroPoll is also an outside polling service that you access through this plugin. You can use the widget that is installed to place a poll in your sidebar, or copy code from the website and place it on a page on your blog. You can either use a particular poll or have the poll change randomly among ones you have created.

The set up for polls is not as easy as on PollDaddy, and the customization is not as versatile, but it does provide much better analytics for your polls on the free account. If you really want to know where you poll takers are coming from , but are short of money for the PollDaddy accounts, this is a decent option to take.

Final Words

So there are 3 decent options to find out what your silent readers want. They are not as satisfying as getting actual comments, and the feedback is probably not as detailed. But people will click a button to register their opinion much more often then they will put words in your comment box.

You can use polls as a way of getting your readers more involved and sparking your imagination for posts to write. Darren Rowse (aka ProBlogger) has developed this technique to a very fine degree on his Digital Photography School. He uses his weekly polls as the basis of posts, and uses them to engage his readers on his site. After you vote that you use your camera in a particular way, you naturally want to leave a comment to explain your vote. And once someone has left one comment, they are more likely to keep doing so.

This kind of thing may not work on every blog, but it is something to keep in mind. The worst thing that can happen if you try it is people don’t vote. Which does not leave you any worse off then you started.

The first line in this story from USA Today is a telling indictment of someone who is widely considered a man of honor. “Sen. John McCain is scheduled to visit Georgia on Thursday to campaign for GOP Sen. Saxby Chambliss, and Sarah Palin may not be far behind.” It is not the fact that McCain is stumping for a Republican that is a failure of principles. That is expected from the person considered to be the head of the party. It is the man he is stumping for that is the problem.

Chambliss is the person that was responsible for running ads during the 2002 Senate campaign that attacked Max Cleland’s patriotism and commitment to the security of the United States. The ads were called “beyond offensive to me” and “[I]t’s worse than disgraceful, it’s reprehensible.” These aren’t the words of some liberal whiner. They are the words of Republican Senators Chuck Hagel and John McCain, respectively.

These were the same kind of ads that Karl Rove developed and used against John McCain during the 2000 Republican primaries in South Carolina. McCain said “I believe that there is a special place in hell for people like those.” referring to the people that used his daughter in push polls. But he had the same people working for him in his 2008 campaign.

And that same primary showed that McCain was not all that committed to his principles. The controversy over the Confederate Flag during that campaign resulted in him admitting “I feared that if I answered honestly, I could not win the South Carolina primary. So I chose to compromise my principles.”

For a man that is supposed to be a maverick, who promised to always tell the truth about his beliefs, McCain seems to spend a lot of time failing to actually follow his principles. He showed “poor judgement” in the Keating Five mess, lied about his beliefs regarding the Confederate Flag controversy in South Carolina, then hired people he earlier called reprehensible to work for him in his Presidential Campaign. And now he is campaigning for Chambliss, a man that uses any means he has to win.

Maybe all of this isn’t a failure of his principles. Maybe his principles are actually exactly what he has been showing us. He wants to win, and is willing to do anything he has to in order to do that. I do not know the man personally, I have to go with what is on the public record. And that record is getting more and more damning.

Yes, I know this is a bit late. Everybody and their brother has been talking about Tuesday and Obama’s win. I had given some thought to driving over to Chicago and standing outside the fence at Obama’s party. But I figured that they wouldn’t call the election until late, and I would have a 4 or 5 hour drive home afterward. So I decided to call the local Obama campaign back and offer to work on the GOTV effort Tuesday, then get a pizza and watch MSNBC and CNN after the polls closed. Then I got a call on Monday afternoon that changed my plans.

I voted in September, the first day it was available. I am pretty sure I was the first person in the county to vote, since they were still sorting out the ballots they had just received from the printer when I went in. While I was there, I offered to work at the polls on election day if they needed me. They signed me up for the training class and put me on the list of people to call if needed. They were pretty happy to have me, since there are not that many people registered as Democrats in this part of the country.

I knew they had me on their list, but they did not call, so I figured I was free to do what I wanted on the 4th. Then the Board of Elections called me at about 4:30 in the afternoon on November 3rd. Could I work the polls the next day, they had 3 people call in sick. I said yes so the next morning, I had to be at the Junior Fair Building at the County Fairground at 5:45 AM.

5:45 AM, heading in to work the polls on November 4, 2008.

Why would anyone think I was tired, just because I couldn’t hold the camera steady. The really bad part about needing to be there so early is the fact that my normal schedule has me going to sleep about 4 or 5 AM. I managed to get about 3 1/2 hours sleep before getting up and heading to the polling place. But I have a harder time handling lack of sleep than I did when I was younger. Imagine that.

The ladies I was working with were surprised to see me, apparently no one had told them the woman they normally worked with was not going to be there. But they quickly put me in her normal place, and showed me what to do.

People marking their ballots or waiting to do so at 10 AM.

Things progress fairly smoothly during the day. There were quite a few people waiting in line when the polls opened at 6:30 AM, and they quickly found their precinct table and got their ballots. Then there was a wait, since there were not enough booths for everyone at once.

It was not a long wait for most people, despite the size of the ballot. I got the impression that quite a few people were either just marking the races for offices and local issues or they had researched the Ohio constitutional issues before they came in to vote. I would prefer the second, since I rather like the idea of an informed electorate.

More people coming in, at about 4:30 PM.

The stream of voters was pretty steady all day long, at least for the precinct I was working in. We never had more than 4 people going through the process or waiting in line, but we seldom had more than 15 or 20 minutes without someone wanting to vote.

We didn’t mind this, since it really helped to keep us busy and made time fly by. With a 15 hour day working the polls, anything that made things seem faster was welcome. Even if it meant they interrupted us while we were eating at the table.

Waiting to drop ballots in voting machine, 6:15 PM.

On the other hand, one of the other precincts apparently had a bus load of people all come in at once. They had a line going out of the building waiting to get their ballot, then waiting to mark their ballots. And after they did that, they had to wait in line again to put their ballot into the scanning machines. I am sure some of them were less than happy about all the waiting, but I didn’t see any anger or hear anything about them being really upset.

Things really slowed down for us during the last hour, with only a few people coming in to our precinct. None of the precincts were really busy, there were only 3 or 4 people still voting when the 7:30 announcement that voting was over was given. Then came closing things down.

A precinct captain making certain that she had the correct procedure.

Besides making sure that all the numbers added in our books, we had to sort out and count all of the ballots. Since each of the machines had several precincts in it, that took quite a while. It didn’t help while you were counting when someone from another precinct would come over and give you a ballot that had been missed during the sorting. On one of those occasions, all 4 of us at our table had to start over after losing track of where we were.

How long it took each precinct depended on how many voters they had and how well the numbers matched. When you finished and were 2 ballots off, you were happy if someone showed up and gave them to you, even if it did mess up your counting.

Different precincts in different stages of sorting and counting ballots.

There were two women at our building acting as poll watchers. They wandered around all day, watching what was happening, occasionally asking questions and helping voters with questions they had. After the polls closed, I asked them who they were with and they told me the Democratic Party.

I understand the desire of the Democratic Party to make sure that everyone got to vote and the votes were counted accurately after 2000 and 2004. But having observers at places like Van Wert is pretty much a waste of resources. The people that worked with me were happy to help anyone vote, and did their best to make sure that everyone that came in wanting to vote had the chance, no matter who they wanted to vote for. I only know of one man that didn’t get to vote, he couldn’t remember the last time he had voted and he had not made sure he was registered before the deadline. And our precinct captain spent almost a half an hour making certain there was not way he could cast a vote.

I wouldn’t say I had a fun day. I enjoyed talking to the ladies I was working with, and I have always enjoyed doing things like this or serving on juries. I understand that makes me somewhat weird, but it is hardly the only thing. I may or may not do this again. It will depend on a lot of things, mostly how much free time I have. But I am glad I did it this time.

Leaving the building after the fun is over, 9 PM.

The Republican party and McCain/Palin campaign have been really hitting things hard with their messages. It is apparent that they are really starting to feel the pressure of the polling numbers that are coming out daily. There is some movement in the polls, including some tightening of the race in the national numbers, but the state polls are not looking good for McCain and it is hurting the down ticket Republicans. Although several of them have managed to shoot their own foot, i.e. Michelle Bachman.

The most irritating Republican talking point is the idea that it is a bad thing to have both the White House and Congress in the hands of the same party. As someone who tends toward the middle of the road, I generally agree with this sentiment. It does help keep the country more toward the center of the road when the President and Congress have to compromise. Unfortunately, it can also lead to gridlock and necessary work not getting done when both sides refuse to compromise.

David Frum, a conservative political commentator at the Washington Post, has written an article with this talking point. He is really afraid of the leftist domination of the Democratic party and what it will do to the country. But Brad Delong, in a very short post called, I Call Bullshit on David Frum, did just that. If it is so bad now, why wasn’t it bad in 2000? or 2002? or 2004?

The interesting part of this tactic is that the Republican Party is using it to push voting for Republican senators and representatives. John McCain is using it to say vote for him. Considering the polling numbers for McCain, unless something really drastic occurs, it is doubtful his use of this message will do much. The Republican senators and representatives may have better luck, probably depending on how closely they have tied themselves to the McCain/Palin ticket.

Carl Huse and David M. Herszenhorn point out in The New York Times that even a veto proof majority in congress does not mean that everything can get passed. Both the major parties are in reality, coalitions of smaller groups that tend to work together. In a parlimentary system, neither would be nearly as large as they are in the US system. Blue Dog Democrats can easily align with fiscally conservative Republicans, with the blessings of their constituents, to block bills they think go too far.

One of the things that has hurt the Republicans this year, especially in the Presidential campaign, is that they seem to have forgotten they are a coalition. McCain/Palin seem to be working hard to pull in the social conservatives, but they are losing the fiscal conservatives and social moderates. And losing the moderates, whether fiscal or social, is a losing strategy in the United States.

Another meme that seems to be flowing through various comment sections on the web is that John Kerry was ahead of Bush in 2004 at this point and McCain can still come back. In reality, Kerry was mostly behind in electoral votes for the last month or so. He had some good polling days, much better than McCains to be honest, but Electoral-vote.com has all of their pages from the 2004 election up, showing that Kerry and Bush were close all through the last month, with Bush usually polling ahead. From the looks of his data, who won was almost random, depending on who had a headache when they got up and decided to skip voting that day.

In comparison, Obama has been leading on the Electoral-vote.com site since mid September just before the economy crashed, with his lead in electoral votes growing steadily. He makes it easy to compare the two campaigns with graphs on this page. Combined with the work that Nate Silver and compatriots have been doing at FiveThirtyEight.com, and it looks like it would take something truly catastrophic to stop Obama.