What is being suggested by more than one person is to simplify your database by creating another table to your data is more easily obtained. The suggestion given above is a good one and might look like this:

---------------------------------------------------------
| Table name:  polls                                    |
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| poll_no | date_begun | date_ended | begun_by | descrip|
---------------------------------------------------------

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| Table name: votes                             |
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| poll_no | option_no | option_text | num_votes |
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[download]

Now think about how you'd approach your problem given that you have a more normalized database to work with.

~CubicSpline
"No one tosses a Dwarf!"