Here's what I want to be able to do:

Create a new entry that becomes a poll. It shows up on my site just like any other entry except that it has the buttons and choices for the poll.

When the user clicks "submit" to cast their vote, a popup window shows up with the current poll results.

Is there any easy way to do this, and a way to make it easy to do everytime? I don't want to have to write pages of customized code each time i want to give my users a poll. PHP would be fine since my main page is in it.

Bumping this one cause I found a cool little tool just now: Sympoll.

This will do polls for you if you have a MySQL database you can use. With a bit of fiddling and patience (since you're obviously comfy with php), you could embed this little sucker right into your site.  To stick a poll in an entry, just make the poll in Sympoll and just throw in the php require statement it coughs up for you.

You can see my humble blog in action with a poll sitting in an entry.  The View All Polls link I have leads to sympoll's default page with some edits, but there's no reason why you couldn't twiddle the output of that script to point to a Polls category archive listing instead.