Massive electronic vote fraud confirmed!

[KamaAina]

in, would you believe, hockey?!

http://www.slate.com/id/2157741/

The big story of this year's contest began with a single fan—22-year-old Steve Schmid of upstate New York. Schmid decided that it would be neat to see a hard-working journeyman get voted into the All-Star Game. He chose the Vancouver Canucks' Rory Fitzpatrick, an unremarkable player without much talent or flashy stats—in hockey terms, a grinder. The "Vote for Rory" movement took off soon after All-Star voting began in late November. Media outlets picked up the story a few weeks later, when the Vancouver players took their morning skate in "Vote for Rory" T-shirts. Rory supporters started posting clever campaign ads on YouTube, and by early December he'd been written about in USA Today, the New York Times, and Sports Illustrated....

The NHL's All-Star voting this year was carried out exclusively via unlimited online balloting. Anyone could vote for any player as many times as they wanted, so long as they took the time to fill out the entire ballot. By the end of the third week of voting, a young Vancouver computer programmer named Brad Touesnard had released the "Rory Vote-O-Matic"—a plug-in for the Firefox browser that allowed fans to fill out the ballot automatically. Thousands of times per hour. The campaign's initial organizers, who hung their shingle at VoteForRory.com, disavowed the use of voting bots. Still, the Vote-O-Matic seemed to have an impact. Over the next two weeks, Rory registered an astonishing 285,000 write-in votes; he surged into second place in the voting on Dec. 19—good enough to ensure a starting spot on the All-Star team....

The press had fallen in love with the Rory campaign, and no one seemed to notice when the Globe and Mail broke the Vote-O-Matic story on Dec. 20. Now the league's inability to stop the Vote-o-Matic (and other automated scripts) placed it in an awkward position. In public, the Bettman crew signed on with the Rory campaign. "It's good that a lot of people are having fun with it," announced a league spokesman. "This story underscores the respect we have for our fans' passion." But something else seemed to be going on behind the scenes. The next round of voting results were a bit surprising. Despite all the news coverage—and all the efforts of the Vote-O-Matic—Fitzpatrick's vote totals had fallen off a cliff. After receiving 285,000 votes the two previous weeks, he got just 58,000 in the week ending on Dec. 26 and dropped to third place in the standings. Had the Vote for Rory campaign run out of steam? Or did the NHL brass decide it was time to take matters into their own hands?

I believe the evidence suggests the NHL cooked the books. Since the league counted only ballots that were entirely filled in, there should have been an equal number of votes cast for hockey's two conferences. But for the week after Christmas, players in the Eastern Conference received 6 percent more votes than those in Fitzpatrick's Western Conference. Among defensemen, the results were even more skewed: The guys in the West—Rory among them—got 16 percent fewer votes overall. (These discrepancies were about three times bigger than any that had come before.) As bloggers were quick to point out, the numbers were exactly what you'd expect to see if the league had manually dumped 100,000 Rory votes. Nothing has been proved, but I'm hard-pressed to come up with another reasonable explanation.

So, to recap the last four NHL seasons: warm-weather expansion team wins Cup, season ruined by greed-driven lockout, warm-weather team that abandoned a hockey-loving New England state leaving it without any pro team wins Cup :grr:, and now Diebold-style vote fraud rocks the All-Star balloting. Ye gods. How can it be that someone as incompetent as Bettman has as yet been unable to find a job in the Bush** Administration?

As for the "abysmal television ratings", quick: What channel is the Vs. Network on your cable system? That's what I thought.

[soleft]

1. the "Rory Vote-O-Matic"— inventor has way too much time on his hand