List volume has been down lately(pretty much every list I am on), so it hasn't been taking up loads of my time like it often does. So last Thursday night I was goofing around, surfing the web and ended up listening to Air America Radios webcast. The show on at the time was The Majority Report with Garafalo and Seder.
It was an interesting show, but prior to one of their commercial breaks, Sam Seder mentioned a "Poll" at hannity.com where surfers had a choice between Bush, Kerry, and Nader, and had Bush Winning with 95%. Now Sean Hannity isn't a very likeable fellow, but The Majority Report (and by extension AAR also I believe) really have it in for him. They also seemed to object to an "unscientific" poll on a partisan site. So the proposal made was that everyone listening go vote at Hannity's site and they even suggested a simple method for voting multiple times (it doesn't involve any hacks). Being bored this sounded like enormous, albeit tedious fun. So I went and voted for Kerry a couple of hundred times. By bedtime, Kerry was up to 50%, Bush at 49% and Nader with 1%. AFAIWasC that sent an adequate message to the dittohead set, so I went to bed satisfied that I had played my part in the political game of dirty tricks. Before I headed to work the next morning the poll had changed with Kerry having 75% and Bush and Nader at 23% and 2% respectively. So I went to work wearing a <BEG>. When I returned home from work, and after reading my email, I decided to follow up on the mischief to see if there was any fallout. (Who knows, maybe Hannity would threaten to prosecute me) What I found was quite a bit of blog groupie talk on both sides of the fence across several sites. The upshot was that Hannity's webmaster had not only shut down the poll, but had deleted it, even from the archives(quite reasonable IMO since it *had* been exploited) and replaced it with a poll with only anti-Dem choices: What is your reaction to Al Gore after hearing his rants about President Bush? *Finally lost it *Needs more meds *Should find a peaceful island Very crafty Mr. webmaster dude! <TU> The blog responses were the most entertaining. Majority Report Radio's blog was quite self congratulatory and many were looking for new polls to conquer. While I was sleeping (slacking some might say<G>) one guy had written a voting program in Java(voting for Nader actually), another guy wrote one in C, and another in VB. (don't have any idea if they were effective or how much a part they played in the outcome) Hannity's poll and the exploit were compared to the Diebold situation and everyone seemed ready to take on Bush in November. Over on Free Republic things were quite different. The Freeps (as they style themselves) only discovered what was happening 10 hours too late, and were desperately trying to "save" the poll by voting once per person. There was a lot of lather, and blathering about how the site had been hacked (it wasn't), how it was a liberal invasion(it was), and confusion as to why they couldn't change the vote by voting. IOW they had no clue as to how it was done. (Really, it was just too simple<G>) But everyone seemed ready to take on Kerry in November. One thing I think both sides came away with is that these silly unscientific polls on partisan sites don't amount to anything, but can stir up a ton of crap. Myself, I would have thought Hannity had more adherents. Before the exploit about 2000 votes had been cast on the poll, and the exploit added 18,000 to 22,000 more. (The poll ended with 25,000 votes before it was cancelled which means Hannity fans and freeps and the like were able to muster an extra 3 or 4 thousand votes by that time) http://www.majorityreportradio.com/weblog/index.php http://www.hannity.com http://www.majorityreportradio.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=203 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1143891/posts xponent http://www.pythonline.com/plugs/idle/FCCSong.mp3 Maru rob
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