Monday, November 17, 2008
Rory Fitzpatrick v2.0
Last year, as a lark, the interneters voted a journeyman player onto the starting all-star team, until the NHL stripped away enough ballots so that he didn’t actually win. This year, shockingly, the NHL made a proud announcement that they are showing the All-Star balloting results in real-time. Well, here are the current results. You will note Montreal Canadiens lead all six starting spots (3 forwards, 2 defensemen, 1 goalie). Here’s an accompanying article. The NHL’s faq says they will take away votes from any bots.


Yawn (and not just because it’s hockey). I don’t understand why anyone is allowed to vote more than once anyway. It wouldn’t be that difficult to limit voting to one per person, at least to the extent that the bots would have to be significantly smarter to game the system.
They could easily send a link to each email address that registers that enables the owner of that address to vote once. Anyone that’s automatically breaking Google’s CAPTCHAs and registering thousands of Gmail addresses per day is making their living sending spam and doesn’t care about the all star game.
Do that, and hand out one ballot per fan at each game. Not very difficult. It seems like they want to encourage ballot box stuffing.