Vote in Unscientific Online Polls!

Among the stranger battle grounds in the total war of this year's presidential campaign is the arena of "unscientific" online polls maintained by most of the major, and many minor news organizations on their web sites.

Prior to the vice presidential debates, both camps, unwilling to cede the slightest appearance of momentum to the other side, sought to mobilize their partisans to vote. If the outcome of these votes is any indication of partisan organizing success, the offices of DNC chair Terry McCauliff must be lit with little plastic trophies of John Edwards,beaming in victory.

However a special trophy has gotta go to someone who goes by the screen name "skinner" who maintains a remarkably comprehensive running list of online polls on the presidential contest on a discussion board hosted by Democratic Underground.The list includes online polls for newspapers and TV stations in swing states like Florida, Michigan, and North Carolina. Here is the version as of this writing.

As inconsequential as unscientific online polls may seem to be, the political parties are taking them dead seriously. Well, OK, they take a lot of things seriously. So "why should you bother?" wondered Jeff Horwitz in an October 6 posting on Salon.coms's War Room blog.

"Well," he answered, "networks like MSNBC do mention the results on the air, which theoretically might influence other voters... at last count, over 2.2 million ballots had been cast on the MSNBC site."

Here are some of the major news organizations that had online polls in the vice presidential debate, and will probably have them for the last two presidential debates. (If you want to organize your friends, forward this message!)

ABC News
CBS News
CNN
FoxNews
MSNBC
PBS
USA Today
Time
Washington Post