The Official Mister Poll Forum

Is it normal to get quite a few votes early on then for the number of votes to slacken off for a while before they build up again?

Well, it really depends on where your traffic is coming from. If it's coming purely from the Mister Poll directory, it's definitely common to get more votes when your poll is first listed and is at the top of the category. As it gets older, it moves down in the listings as newer polls get added at the top. If votes start to go up again after that, it's possible that people are finding your poll via our search feature or from external search engines. Mister Poll gets pretty heavily spidered by Google and the other various search engines, but it does usually take a few days for newly listed polls to start showing up in their search results. That could explain the lag before the second surge in voting.