I was having the "Loading Poll..."

problem as described elsewhere.
Looking through all the other threads and trying all sorts of things, I ended up turning off each plugin, one at a time. As stated elsewhere, something was putting some ill-behaving code on the page...
Turns out that the culprit in my case was a plugin provided by the serving company that hosts my site - SiteGround.
I have their plugin:
jHackGuard installed. When I disabled that plugin, it worked.
Continuing to explore, it seems that as long as I
disable the option in jHackGuard to
Filter $_POST, the pool loads with no problem.
A strange behavior for me - that kept the problem showing up before I advertised the poll - was that the poll loaded for Administrator accounts, but didn't load for anyone else. I have no idea why the administrators could see the poll - I can reason out it's the may JHackGuard lets down it's guard, but I really don't care right now - at least the thing works for everyone.
I hope this helps someone save some time.....
And Oli, thanks for a great product!!!