The Paper Trail

Student Media Voter Fraud?

February 9, 2009 RSS Feed Print

Middlebury College has around 2,500 undergraduates. In our world-famous Best Alternative Media Outlet 2008 contest, the school's Middblog has almost twice as many votes as it has students. And, according to some interested parties, that number suddenly shot up over the weekend. Suspicious, no?

On the other hand, the Timothy Dwight blog, which is the creative outlet of ONE DORM out of Yale, has a similar number of votes, which is about equal to Yale's 5,200-person undergraduate student body. I smell something even more fishy.

In any case, I just wanted to point out that another year means another voting fraud scandal. Contrary to popular belief, writers can sometimes do math, and I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE ALL UP TO.

Keep it clean, folks. You don't want me to involve the tech folks on this one. All that does is distract me from real blogging.

And don't forget to vote for the other neglected categories:

Tags:
colleges,
fraud,
students

Reader Comments Read all comments (16)

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Last year, if you recall, "the u" also cheated by linking every single one of its schools (dozens and dozens) to an automatic vote page for just one school, and that school ended up winning the poll. No one said much of anything.

I agree that the poll has problems with it. And I also agree that the best "blog" poll is the most anticipated contest that the Paper Trail runs. Blogs have really universal appeal.

I'd like to see this problem fixed. There's no way that Ted Dwight's blog for one tiny dorm at Yale can receive so many hits. It's unlikely that the subject matter appeals to that many people outside of Yale to warrant that.

p.s. you have to go through more hoops to leave a comment than you do to vote in that poll, by the way.

just.transcendtal of MA 2:29AM February 16, 2009

I think the reason our number jumped so quickly was because we didn't know about it until Midd Blog and Midd Confessional had links up. When people finally saw the link, they voted. It's that simple.

Midd Student of VT 10:20PM February 11, 2009

Seriously, this poll is whack. Make a new one with actual security. I can't believe the larger blogs are so far behind.

HH of CT 3:31PM February 10, 2009

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