Can I run 2 active polls on my site?
Define an auxiliary content type (say MyPoll). 

I added a Node reference CCK field to standard Poll and a CCK Node Referrers (backreference) field to MyPoll. You can then easily create one (or even more!) polls as "children" of your MyPoll node, and attach their teaser content (the voting widget) to the MyPoll node. 

As MyPoll is a "standard" content type, you can do whatever you want with it in views... including the display of the referred poll widgets. It's not straightforward... 

I was inspired by http://www.lullabot.com/articles/photo-galleries-views-attach. Look at it this way: "galleries" are "mypolls", and "images" are "polls".