Student Media Voter Fraud?

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

As a TD Blog Writer, I am dismayed at the ridiculous numbers I keep finding in the polls.

TD's students over the past week have contacted all friends, family, faculty from here and back home, asking them to vote for TD's blog. TD's blog has had articles written about us in Yale and New Haven's newspapers, every TD student's facebook status contains a link to the voting page so that people can vote for TD, each student has emailed everyone on their contact list...we've done literally everything we can to get literally EVERYONE we know to vote for the blog - and furthermore, we've told them to spread the word to THEIR communities and encourage their own friends and families to vote for the blog.

Unfortunately, within the last hour, TD's numbers have shot up 20%. All of TD is shocked and extremely annoyed. It is clear that somebody is trying to sabotage us and make it look like we have been cheating the past week. There needs to be accountability, a tech team that can see when votes come in in large influxes. All votes that may appear artificial (ie, when 2000 votes come in in the span of an hour) should be discounted. Whether they are the artificial votes of TD, MiddBlog, or anyone else. Make this race fair, or have your blog (if not the US News and World Report) lose credibility.

Rek of CO 3:23PM February 10, 2009

I have a bad feeling whoever bumped up MiddBlog so fast did the same to TD this morning to get us disqualified... a gain of almost 13% in one afternoon is extremely surprising. I would like to note that no member of the TD community has used or will use a computer program to achieve victory - we are committed to winning this contest with real votes and real support.

Jordan of CT 2:58PM February 10, 2009

After continuing this discussion elsewhere on the internet, I though I would post my additional thoughts here:

It is wrong wrong to run the script I posted (or the ones that were run prior), doing so is known as cheating. My analogy was off. It should have been “Set your shiny gold statue on a busy city sidewalk.” Sure, 10,000 people might be honest and walk by (or vote once), but it just takes one person to reach down (or write a loop) for the prize to be taken from its rightful owners.

My point in posting the script above is to highlight for those who have never written a program or used a command-line environment before how absolutely trivial it is to tell a computer to load a web page repeatedly. (BTW: the script I posted will be easy for the poll administrators to filter out by looking at their server logs, but minimal changes would make that process harder.)

Any online opinion poll that does not have at least some basic security (such a CAPTCHA, email-verification, or just a limited audience of people) is a farce. Whether ‘vote fraud’ was obvious (as in this case of highly inflated numbers) or not, the Paper Trail blog would be dishonest in awarding any honor based on such an insecure poll.

Similarly, it is dishonest journalism to report findings from such a poll on any topic where people would care enough about the results to spend 2 minutes writing a loop. A poll of “What is your favorite color?” would probably be safe from tampering just by disinterest, but “Which truck is better, Ford or Chevy?” is almost guaranteed to result in attempted tampering. Far too often major news organizations publish the results of such insecure online polls while not being honest with readers that these polls are likely to be a complete sham.

It is dishonest (and not justifiable) to cheat. It is also dishonest to claim to measure “opinion” when all that is being measured is how many times a URL was loaded.

AnonyMouse of AL 3:37AM February 10, 2009