I think it's best to let the admin decide how to run their site. On our site we use polls for "meetup" type voting and activity management. So features that would be useful for us are:
- changing polls to public (because the default is non-public and people forget to check it because they have to scroll down to find it).... and there is no way to fix it without recreating the thread... which is a giant pain in the butt for admins.
- the ability to have more than one poll on a thread.
- letting users change their votes.

For example, I posted a poll about an upcoming camping trip. I forgot to make it public, so we can't see who is interested. The only fix is to delete the event/thread (we have a mod installed that ties events to a thread for discussion).

As the event evolves people may need to change their vote from yes to no or vice versa. Likewise, we may want to post another poll as we solidify the event.

Our needs aren't necessarily the way someone else may use it and I think it's important to leave the options up to the site operator. A site for sports might not want people shifting around on their votes. I can see where it would become a popularity contest on some forums.

Overall, vbulletin is great. However there are some options that are annoying and the lack of control over polls is one of them. Ideallly, this should all be built in and controllable from the admin panel. :)

I spent a few minutes on this and managed to modify it to allow the poll to be made public.

There are two modifications needed:
1. Modify the XML code:
Make it look like this:
\\
Save as -v2 or something in case you need the original mod. If you are going to re-install this don't forget to check "allow overwrite"

Step 2:
Use this code on the template mod:
NOTE: I agree with the original author that care should be exercised when converting a poll from private to public. I also think that there are times when it is appropriate and I needed this feature on my system. Many thanks to Andreas for the original mod as he did all of the heavy lifting and I simply hacked his script a little bit.

I am new to mods on vbulletin and can't promise that this won't cause you headaches. It works on my board on v.3.8.2 Please exercise caution and make a backup before installing any mod.

@briangreul
As said I don't support adding such (which most likely would be illegal in germany at least)

Please remove the code you've posted immediately.
Thanks.

As this Add-on still gets abused for illegal actions I've got no choice but to pull if off completely.

Sorry.