Yay technology! I'm currently reading No Place for Amateurs by Dennis Johnson. It's a book about the professionalization of political campaigns, and Johnson talks a lot about scientific and not-so scientific polls. Here's a couple of stories about bad polls that I found amusing:

"USA Today asked its readers in June 1990 if Donald Trump symbolized what was right or wrong with the United States. Eighty-one percent of the 6,406 people who called an 800 number said that Trump was great and 19 percent said he was bad for the country. But there was an organized effor to fix the numbers: it turned out that 72 percent of the telephone calls came from two phone numbers."

"In July 1999, baseball fans were encouraged to use the internet to vote for their favorite All-Star players. One Red Sox enthusiast programmed his computer to cast ballot nonstop, and after two days, he had "voted" forty-thousand times for his hero, Nomar Garciaparra."

"TIME.com conducted a straw poll allowing anyone, not just registered voters, to cast their ballot choice for president. Orrin Hatch, who was barely visible in most traditional polls in late 1999, garnered 60 percent of the votes on the TIME.com survey. Hatch had hyperlinked the TIME.com poll to his own campaign website, and his supporters enthusiastically clicked away."

If only real voting were that easy. Of course, bad polling has been around a lot longer than the internet. It's just a lot easier to cook up convincing numbers that mean nothing nowadays.