Googling ‘poll software‘ or ‘blog poll’ is an exercise in futility, which has got to be frustrating for beginning bloggers who want to incorporate a poll into their blog. That’s because, quite frankly, most hosted polling solutions are terrible.

It’s not that there aren’t plenty of poll applications littering searches (and the accompanying adsense ads) — it’s just that they appear to have been built by people who didn’t test them on different browsers and don’t care about the aesthetics of something that will ultimately go on someone else’s site.

Another issue is the fact that the overwhelming majority of hosted poll applications out there, such as Quimble, dPolls, Poll Genius, etc., do not allow you to create anything other than the simplest of polls — ones in which users select only one answer out of all possible options. (Zoho Polls is an exception in that it lets you create polls where folks rate various items with stars, like you’d rate a seller on Ebay.)

What’s breathtaking about that oversight is that it completely ignores the (admittedly somewhat obscure) discipline of voting mathematics. (There’s an excellent article on the subject of voting mathematics at Science News that will leave you shaking your head that any election system in the world is based on simple plurality voting.)

Imagine for instance that you want to ask your readers — or even just a select group of insiders — to help you choose one name out of a roster of three for a new blog or feature that you’re launching. Just as in previous elections in the U.S., with simple plurality voting (in which voters can only cast their vote once, for a single candidate), it’s possible that the third item on the list will split the vote for what could have been everyone’s favorite horse in the race, if you had used a more sophisticated voting system.

That’s why it was so gratifying to discover that PollDaddy, which is extremely easy to set up, works on every browser I tested it in, and even looks good, allows for what’s known as “approval voting” — that is, voting in which users can simply check off all of the options that they like. Some scientific societies use the approval voting system that PollDaddy allows for their elections, and research into the mathematics of voting shows that in all cases it is better at getting voters what they want than simple plurality voting.

Not only will this give you a more reliable result when asking outsiders to vote on more than two options, but PollDaddy also allows you to create more complicated polls (such as reader surveys that include gender, age, location, HHI, etc.) rather than having to create a separate poll for each of those questions. Reader surveys are something that is widely used in the professional media world (advertisers want to know what demographic they’re selling to on your site) that could help a dedicated blogger target his or her content, or even just survey his or her users to find out what kinds of posts they like best.

That said, what post on polling software would be complete without a poll? Let’s try a simple user survey — this will help the bloggers on this site get to know our readers a little better, and it’s completely anonymous.

Feel free to trumpet your own favorite polling software in the comments; I’d love to hear what other solutions people have had success with.