Sunday, January 27, 2002

Re: Even unscientific elections get rigged (Epstein, RISKS-21.87) This is really nothing new. The article Epstein linked to mentions the Microsoft "astroturf" campaign, but as early as the spring of 1998 a high-profile case of good-natured ballot stuffing was widely remarked upon: the People Magazine poll for Most Beautiful People. A campaign to write-in Howard Stern regular "Hank, the Angry Drunken Dwarf" had already boosted him to second place, until on 28 April 1998 Slashdot picked up the story and Hank shot to number one (by a margin of over 10 times his nearest rival). People played along to an extent, adding Hank as an official ballot choice, but complaining about vote-stuffing. That same spring I was witness to an episode more like Microsoft's effort. The game company I worked for, Kesmai, had a game up for an online award based on a reader survey. The director of the department that included testing (the section I was in) instructed us to "vote early and often" until Kesmai's offering topped the list. (Kesmai no longer exists, having been bought by Electronic Arts in early 2000 and folded into the struggling EA.com online game venture.) All our effort was ultimately for naught, as by the next morning someone *else* had apparently been hard at work stuffing the votes. We pondered writing a Perl script but never did so. The real risk in both of these cases is the assumption that a) one's own poll is too small or specialized to attract a ballot-stuffing campaign or b) that you can effectively detect rogue voters in an anonymous system. [Joe Thompson via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 90] 0:00 # G!