I try to never conflate the meaning of the words "illegal" and "wrong", as they are rather orthogonal, even if many people do not realize this.
And I think it's wrong (unethical) to do so for a multitude of reasons. Two main ones are because it's misleading to people reading/interpreting the results, and that it's actively trying to sabotage the intent of whoever set up the poll.
Don't get me wrong though, if we're talking about a stupid or silly poll, on a stupid or silly site, or if it's in the context of a really good prank, etc, it can be a forgiveable type of "wrong". In fact in certain circumstances one could even argue that it's not actually completely wrong, simply because I wouldn't want to live with a system of ethics where pranks are never right. That's a tricky one (as is often the case with discussions about ethics).
However, that's not really the type of manipulating of polls we were discussing here.
I try to never conflate the meaning of the words "illegal" and "wrong", as they are rather orthogonal, even if many people do not realize this.
And I think it's wrong (unethical) to do so for a multitude of reasons. Two main ones are because it's misleading to people reading/interpreting the results, and that it's actively trying to sabotage the intent of whoever set up the poll.
Don't get me wrong though, if we're talking about a stupid or silly poll, on a stupid or silly site, or if it's in the context of a really good prank, etc, it can be a forgiveable type of "wrong". In fact in certain circumstances one could even argue that it's not actually completely wrong, simply because I wouldn't want to live with a system of ethics where pranks are never right. That's a tricky one (as is often the case with discussions about ethics).
However, that's not really the type of manipulating of polls we were discussing here.