Gosh, how strange. I would have naturally assumed that converting the poll into a reference to an external item precisely should make it easy to refer to the same poll from multiple entries; for example, copying it into a poll-themed community would seem an obvious application.

But there will always be people, I suppose, who contrive to do a thing in a way that has the inconveniences of both the obvious approaches and the benefits of neither :-)

I assume, incidentally, that you're speaking literally when you talk of transferring the reference to a public entry? I actually posted this poll in a my-eyes-only private entry to begin with, so I could make sure I'd got it right, and only once I was satisfied did I make the entry public. Nobody reported a problem with that, though, so I assume that the problem is with transferring a poll into a different entry rather than changing the security settings on the entry it started off in.