I don't know what this has to do with Perl, but it looks like the space is there because you made a 2-column wide table and put the radio button in the left hand column and the text in the right hand column.

If that's not what you want it to look like, just change the _ssi_poll.html file so it looks the way you want it to. This is an HTML problem, not a Perl one (despite the fact that the CGI script appears to be written in Perl).

Update: I looked at it further after he contacted me via email; if you want to see an entertainingly bad script (not written by the poster), you might want to look at it. Anyway, apparently the misspelling of $votes_received in line 164 was keeping the chop() from deleting the newline; this was showing up as whitespace. Sigh.

Not being a CGI programmer, I don't know about what's out there, but is there a lot of carelessly written code about that people are using?