Instant polls make me burp

     Dennis K. was one of the more colorful characters I ever worked with, and had a habit of describing something he found odious: "Tube tops on fat women make me burp."
     That's what I think of all these instant polls -- polls in the paper, polls during the ball game, polls on line. They make me burp.
     "Weigh in with your opinion; what do YOU think of the Theory of Relativity?"
     It's not so bad when it's about sports or entertainment. Who's your favorite singer, or who do you think will win the Ravens game. It's all mindless fun.
     But not as mindless as some of the poll results you see about supposedly more serious, certainly more complex issues. "Do you think all members of Congress should be sent home?"  Betcha that one would be nearly unanimous in Fortress Carroll, except of course for Roscoe Bartlett, who is apparently still working on a plan for term limits 26 years after running on that platform.
     I can read the question in a poll and tell you in advance what the split will be; the one that appears in the local paper is more laughs than what is left of the comic pages, but there is never any mention as to how many people respond to the thing. Maybe 10? That means that easily 90 percent of Carroll County residents think we should pass a law ending government. But then who would enforce the law?
     Oh, yeah; I forgot. The sheriff, deemed by the constitutionalists as possessing the most power in the county, state, country and maybe the universe. I can't find that in my copy of the constitution, but maybe they have kind of their own King James version or something. Hey, it's almost a free country.
     I have lost some faith in the value of local instant polls, and by that I mean anything you can do on line, ever since I saw an email from a motivated activist during one particularly hot debate on public policy.
     Send this to everyone on your email list, the writer implored. Vote on line as often as you can, go back every day and stack the vote.
     The rationale for his ballot stuffing admonition was that it was a good way to let the politicians know what The People are thinking.  Or at least fifteen or twenty of them, times the number of votes that they cast per day. How useful.
     What they're really doing, of course, is trying to convince the unsuspecting masses that the popular opinion is thus and so. Seems to work, too, all too often.
     What really makes be burp is when the news media picks up on such sloppy poll results and writes a news story about it, or -- worse -- an editorial.
     But that's a different posting.