Personally, I think it's kind of funny. Someone must have alot of time on their hands to be going through the vote pages and IDing the input html elements you need in order to do a vote script for each particular online poll.
But once you've got it set up, you're golden. Initiate multiple sessions and flood all the polls within minutes.
I still think it would be useful to get some media-geek to weigh in on this and demo for one of these sites (FNC?) how easy it is to spoof these polls.
It is incredibly easy to do. I used to load test our server farm using webbrowser objects. Takes about 5 minutes to write the code on a bad day.
It's easy enough to test the veracity of the poll. The IIS log captures the IP address of incoming votes. It's simple enough to import it into excel and count the votes for each IP address and exclude duplicates. We used to catch people messing with our web farm that way. You see 150K hits from 1 IP address in 60 minutes, you block that IP address. :)