Microsoft caught stuffing the ballot boxes
January 9, 2002
ZDNet UK: .Net vote rigging illustrates importance of Web services
"Several of the voters evidently followed a link contained in an email, the subject line of which ran: "PLEASE STOP AND VOTE FOR .NET!" We know this, because our logs include the Web address where visitors browsed from; when people click there from a Microsoft Exchange email message, Exchange helpfully gives us the subject line and username. The people who followed that link all had email addresses in the microsoft.com domain."
This is a pretty common occurance (not just with Microsoft). Anonymous online polls are for the most part, bogus.