The landslide winner of a recent TIME.com poll on the GOP candidates was a shocker. The respondents' choice for the presidential nomination was none other than ... Orrin Hatch.

That's the same Orrin Hatch who's wallowing near the bottom of the Republican field by almost every measure--including most polls. TIME.com's straw poll allowed anyone, not just registered voters, to cast a ballot and to do so as many times as they wished. The Utah senator's Web site linked supporters to the poll, and he pulled in 60 percent of the vote.

While this unscientific survey is the Web's version of the just-for-fun 900-number telephone polls, there's concern among researchers that the public has trouble distinguishing one poll from another on the Web. In fact, the news media has picked up on some of these pseudopolls, and in at least one instance reported on the poll as if it were credible. An ABC.com straw poll on the Democratic presidential candidates found 25 percent of respondents favored Warren Beatty. Amazingly, the New York Times' Maureen Dowd cited the results as evidence that the political "nutty season" had begun.

The confusion surrounding online polls is adding fuel to the biggest debate now raging among pollsters: Is it time for the Internet to replace the telephone as the polling technology of choice?

Already, the Harris Poll Online has chronicled the upcoming presidential contest by assembling a pool of 5 million Internet users and surveying demographically adjusted samples of that pool every month. The company's efforts have attracted wide interest, but Harris' methods have prompted concern that Internet users are not representative of the national population: They're too white, too male, too young, and too wealthy.

"Our opponents think you should not let it out of the garage yet," says Jonathan Siegel, director of Harris' Election 2000. "But Internet polling is going to happen."

Meanwhile, media outlets and well-established polling entities such as the Gallup Organization say they are staying away from Internet polling--for now.

"I will be doing what I normally do: blocks of nationally representative telephone surveys," says Kathleen Frankovic, director of surveys for CBS News. She admits she's intrigued by the flexibility of Internet polls and the potential for sharing visual materials with respondents online. But she notes that the Net still poses problems for pollsters. "You can't just randomly sample Internet users. You're not supposed to send unsolicited e-mail. And there is a truly nonrepresentative nature to the people actively engaged on the Internet." Most disturbing of all, she says, is the underrepresentation of the over-65 age group, which, studies show, votes in high numbers.

At the same time, there are new efforts underway to perfect the use of the Net as a polling technology. InterSurvey, a company recently started by two Stanford University professors, pulls a random sample the old-fashioned way--through random-digit phone dialing--and then equips panel members with Internet-access devices, such as WebTVs, so they can respond to Web-based surveys. The company, which is backed by venture capitalists and the university, has thus avoided much of the criticism leveled at Harris over its sampling; InterSurvey is also in talks with several campaigns and consultants about work on the 2000 election.

When pollsters talk about a "representative sample" they mean a sampling that accurately reflects the population at large. The most widely used method is random-digit dialing, in which the first six digits of a telephone number are selected to allow for every region to be well represented, while the remaining four digits are dialed at random.