I thtought about this a little more in depth with the people for whom I would be developing this plugin and it turns out for the polls the anonymity is not such a big deal.
Really what they want is some kind of RSVP plugin - who is going to attend what events and how many people are they bringing.
They like the look and feel of this polls plugin however, so I think I'm going to rely on it heavily for inspiration and derive a new plugin from it to allow event organizers to
- define an event (as a topic)
- define various options for it
- Response (yes/no/maybe select box)
- Number of guests (numeric/select box)
- What food they will bring to share (text input)
- collect ever-changing responses from paricipants
That last point is probably the most important one. They need to allow users to change their responses. Actually, now that I think of it, in my little discussion group there was a demand for users to be able to change their votes.
So maybe there are several topics here:
(a) optional anonymity in the polls plugin
(b) vote variability (users can change their mind and overwrite previous poll responses)
(c) an RSVP plugin containing aspects of both a and b and its own stuff.
Sounds like a fun little project for me. :-)