I usually put up the Pajamas Media weekly straw poll - on the Mondays that I remember to do it. For instance, I completely space it last Monday.
But, this is my favorite straw poll on the 'net - GOP Straw Polls. Their downfall is they don't run it every month, so it falls off people's (mine) surfing habits. This is the straw poll for August, the previous one was put up in May. I don't know how long August's has been up, but it wasn't there a couple of weeks ago when I last checked. The polls are usually open for voting until the next one is started.
What makes this poll so good is you can filter the data to see what kind of voters are favoring one or the other candidate. Ron Paul is not included this time. Why not? Because the people who vote for him in these internet polls are not serious. The last poll had Paul with the most votes, but when you clicked on the filter to show who else his supporters found acceptable, well, not surprisingly, Paulbots found no other candidate acceptable.
Despite Paul's absence from the August GOP Straw Poll, they seem to be getting their whacks in. Click on the Ultra-Conservative (#10) filter and the leading votes are for none with only a couple of other candidates as acceptable. My guess is a lot of Paulbots, with their main man cast out, are voting for none.
Hillbilly White Trash has a reference to the Paulbot syndrome on the GOP Straw Poll:
Here is a statement by Matt Margolis on his decision to exclude ass-clown Ron Paul from this month's GOP straw poll:
UPDATE: Some of you may be wondering about the absence of Ron Paul from this months straw poll. Let me explain. After my decision to include Ron Paul in the previous poll, I monitored (to the best of my ability) the efforts by Paul's online supporters. With the help of other bloggers, we discovered a sophisticated coordinated effort to spam the poll, obfuscate their actions, and even cheat the poll.Lem adds:
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The fact that the Paul campaign was asking directly about the security measures indicates that the gaming of online polls is not just the work of overzealous supporters with lots of time on their hands (because the part-time jobs at McDonald's aren't very demanding). The attempt to create a distorted image of Paul's true level of support is apparently a deliberate strategy of the Paul campaign.
So much for Libertarians being "principled".
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