MANIPULATION EXPOSED!

It is clear that supporters of the provincial government are behind this. The question is, are they officially sanctioned or are they acting on their own? Do they actually work for the government or the party? -Geoff Meeker

Chalk one up for i-democracy and blogging. Many of us in the blogosphere have discussed the problems with internet polling, in particular the VOCM Question of the day. Often the question of the day is manipulated by various "causes" to try and impact public opinion. There are no saints in the opposition or the government when it comes to attempting to skew the results. Government just has a lot more monkeys at its disposal to click away.

I have written VOCM in the past and pointed out the problems and the practices. It seems they know it is an unscientific poll and have not been that concerned about making it less easy to manipulate and more accurate.

Yesterday blogger Geoff Meeker launched an experiment. He explained on his blog that there were a couple of ways to override the one vote per person rule. Some people have designed programs that automatically ping votes repeatedly and others have these bingo sheets where they can have 8 screens up at a time and just click away.

Meeker's experiment proved his point. The server crashed under the pressure of the repeated clickers. The normal stackers hit a brick wall and the problem was exposed for all to see.

Good job Geoff. Now if only VOCM would take a look at the IP addresses of the clickers and tell us how many of them originated from the provincial government!

I am still waiting for information I requested from CBC regarding their poll related to the Premier's criticism of the Cameron Commission which seemed to be getting stacked on Friday but disappeared over the weekend.