We all know that online voting and "reader's choice awards" are well-nigh meaningless these days. The results purport to convey the views of the readership. In fact, they represent the views of a few individuals who know how to stuff a ballot box.
These antics are so 1995 (remember Harry, the Angry Drunken Dwarf and his friend Harry, the Drunken Angry Dwarf?), but they persist and will never go away.
Fast forward to the latest "scandal" - the voting for the $magazine Reader's Choice award. Kevin Bedell describes it this way:
Another example of this is the annual ballot stuffing that occurs in the voting for the Java Developer's Journal (JDJ) Reader's Choice Awards. It seems every company that has a product nominated sends out e-mail blasts to their employees encouraging them to vote for the company's products.Hm. Good to know that even Java vendors use Perl for the hard stuff. ;-)Some companies raise this ballot stuffing to an art form. Their mottos seem to be, "Vote early, vote often, and write a perl script to keep voting for you after you leave for the day".
