Marriage poll, part 2

[crschmidt]

http://www.livejournal.com/users/griffen/667656.html

It's a major scam. They're removing votes that don't agree. We need help now more than ever - vote early, vote often. If someone's going to scam us, we need to show them who's boss.

http://peanut.sytes.net/marriagepoll.txt

Stats updated every five minutes. (If the file starts getting huge, I'll cut the top off and save it.)

Fastest google time ever, for me: crawler9.googlebot.com - - [17/Dec/2003:22:54:43 -0600] "GET /marriagepoll.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 2071 "-" "Mediapartners-Google/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)"

Apparently someone has been linking ;)

Comments

[eevee.livejournal.com]

well, actually, we scammed them (http://griffs-grumbles.blogspot.com/2003_12_01_griffs-grumbles_archive.html#107181724978959925).

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

This information was released later, and indeed, it was admitted to.

However, I still seriously doubt the figures for the numbers of votes against gay marriage.

My reasoning behind this is one of simple mathematics:

Yesterday afternoon, during the busiest time for voting, There were approximately 20-40 votes being placed for the first poll option, with 400-500 being placed for the second.

However, at 6am central time, the votes were still increasing by 400 - but half of them were coming from the first poll option. At the time this was taking place, only 600 users were listed as being on the AFA's website by their official counter on their homepage - meaning that every five minutes, 2/3s of the people on the site were voting.

Now, this might have been true at some other times, but I don't understand why the graph of the number of votes, if this poll is US only, is so wildly off from most internet usage world wide. To have higher statistics - by a factor of 10 - at 6am than at 4pm is almost unheard of.

I don't trust the results of the poll. I don't trust the people who are giving the poll. Unless the release all the information they have that allows them to claim that these votes are unique, I will continue to not trust them.

I do concede that the 3000 votes removed were most likely added by someone using a script, and I have no problem with that. However, I see the likelihood that this isn't being done on both sides of the issue as being relatively small.

The site has a vested interest in protecting its opinions. No site so biased can claim that the votes are fair, and unless I see full statistics (which I dont' expect - it would be invasion of privacy) I doubt I will place any faith in this poll, no matter which way the votes go.

[eevee.livejournal.com]

and yet if they're cheating, why is the second choice winning? and if.. everyone else is cheating, why aren't they removing more votes? and...

...you know, I'm just going to not think about this and resume blindly cheering for option two, although I somewhat doubt they'll be as willing to send the results to Congress now.