There’s something I’ve been wondering about polls. I dislike public polls no matter how innocuous the subject, as I think private polls simply give better results. Better, more truthful, more accurate, however you want to phrase it.
But how private are they? Do the mods or even the OP who started the poll have access to who voted in which way? Or is the software such that no one can ever see? Just curious, and the answer could influence many people’s future voting.
If the poll is private, mods can’t see who said what; nor can the OP. Not sure about admins, but I don’t think so.
Thanks. As I said, I was just curious. Some polls have some very personal questions, and I’ve wondered if there might be some sort of snickering party going on behind the scenes. You never know! 
Oh, we have a lot more to snicker about than how people voted in polls. 
These days, that would appear to be true.
Admins can’t either.
That said, nothing is really private. The owner of a message board, if they have really good skills, can see everything including private messages. Very few people have both the know how and the desire to do so.
Would that depend on the particular message board? There was a local one here in Thailand, run by an Austrian, and there was some sort of kerfuffle when it turned out he was vetting PMs. There was always something like a day or two delay, because it turned out he was pre-approving each one. Needless to say, it’s not a popular place.
Was it a vB message board? I just tool a quick look at the Admin Control Panel at giraffeboads and that doesn’t appear to be one of the available settings.
Don’t know. I don’t usually participate on local forums, because there are all kinds of nuts on them (sort of like what’s happening to ABTM these days). But I have seen this one, and it looks to be a different system.
There are hacks to vBulletin that would allow an admin to read private messages. These were mentioned back when some people were lamenting that PMs can’t really be moderated.