I'm thinking of starting a forum website, but I'm a bit lost in all the options there are for software to run one. I was hoping that I could get some recommendations from people here.

A major component of what I'd like to do is polling, but that seems like something that any forum software can do. I don't know much about web programming, so ideally I'd be using software that doesn't require much tinkering, but I'm open to learning or just partnering with someone with that skill if needed.

I imagine that most forum software can do what I want, but it's still hard to pick one. I'm looking at PhpBB right now, but does anyone have any other suggestions? Have people had good experiences using PhpBB?

I'd just use vBulletin though I doubt the choice matters much. Both are basically the same software at this point.

I quite like Simple Machines, 'though as you've already said, most large forum packages are reasonably capable.

Running a forum (well) is quite a lot of work though, and takes a while to get established -- are you sure a forum is really what you want? Could you do the same thing using a blog system with comments using software such as WordPress (perhaps with a plugin for polls)?