My thought exactly, Escher. So far the experiment hasn't met expectations. Instead Agonistas have again proven themselves to be thoughtful, compassionate people with reason and common sense in full supply. Damn!

I can think of only 3 possible reasons for the poll outcome so far. Either there has been human interference in the form of internal "call home" alerts from certain posters; or the spider software is either broken or down for the holidays; or, omg, even the freepers are choking on their own vomit this time.

Mind you, at this writing, 10 percent of the voters (38 people) are apparently onside with the carnage, which is already a pretty horrific poll result when you think of it. The poll has only been up since yesterday so it still has a week or two more to go. Let's wait and see.

Aside from a genuine interest in general views on the subject, this poll had/has the subsidiary intention of testing Megaphone poll skewing. So far, thankfully, it's proving to be defective, at least in spidering the Agonist.

of the kind of mechanism that's been built to manipulate perception, but I wouldn't place too much importance on that specific method.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=freeping

freeping

"stacking poll results by directing people to a web poll; with the goal of intentionally biasing the results to support their particular point of view"

I think it got its name because members of Free Republic were notorious for doing it.