Polling

Experienced participants usually find polls highly annoying because

• The pollers almost never realize that the best way to go would be to ask people to reply by personal mail and summarize the results - and if they do, half of the people answer to the whole group anyway. This means lots of really uninteresting traffic, without an actual result.
• Almost invariably, the questions are trivial, like "how old is everyone?" or "where do you live?", or the matter of holy wars, like "What's your favourite distribution?" on a Linux ML, or "Who should Tenchi marry?" on a Tenchi Muyo related ML.
• This also means that the same polls appear over and over again, about once per month in extreme cases. Very annoying.

Poll"ing (?), n. [See Poll the head.]

1.

The act of topping, lopping, or cropping, as trees or hedges.

2.

Plunder, or extortion.

E. Hall.

3.

The act of voting, or of registering a vote.

Polling booth, a temporary structure where the voting at an election is done; a polling place.

© Webster 1913.