Massive Vote Fraud at SQLTeam.com

By Bill Graziano on 22 November 2000 | Tags: Site News

With all the "goings on" in Florida and the recent allegations of vote selling here on SQLTeam.com I thought a little research was in order. Imagine my shock at discovering massive voter fraud here at the bastion of data integrity: SQLTeam.com. Read on gentle reader for all the horrors of SQLTeam voting "irregularities" revealed.

I thought with all the issues surrounding the Presidential vote counting in Florida I'd do a little research into the vote counting at SQLTeam. Specifically I looked into the voting in our own little presidential poll. At the time that I write this, the system is showing 390 votes cast and Bush leading 40% to 39%. That leaves me (graz) with a mere 21% of the vote. However I was pretty sure people had voted more than once. Especially since an honest, sincere, virtous reader indicated they may have "accidentally" voted more than once. Hmmmmm.

So I did a little digging into my database. As per my privacy statement I collect IP addresses of people that vote in my polls. And a darn good thing I do! Out of my 390 votes I had 208 unique IP addresses. Uh oh. It seems almost half my votes were duplicates. This means that more than 50% of the votes might have been fraudulent!

I had one person that voted a whopping 48 times. And 8 people that had voted at least 10 times. And 30 people that voted more than once. I checked a few of the IP addresses to see if I could find anything fishy. I was looking for devious blue-haired Floridians messing with another election. More on this later.

So who were these Poll Fraudsters voting for? Gore received 89 duplicate votes, Bush totalled 57 dupes and I ONLY tallied 30 duplicates. Clearly I am the amatuer as far as voter fraud is concerned. You might notice the numbers don't add up. This seems to be an issue with elections as far as I can tell and I'm not going to investigate it either.

I did only get two people publicly complaining about ballot complexity. That appears better than Florida at first glance but the percentages show the true character of my readers. Those two people are obviously system analysts that design interfaces.

I haven't come across any confirmed sales of votes but I have deleted a couple of interesting posts from the forum. These mainly involved an offer to trade a vote (or votes as the case may be) for a certain number of yak hooves (these being the only approved currency on SQLTeam). These were quickly deleted as the price was far too low for a vote on SQLTeam. And with the ability (and proclivity) for multiple votes the economic implications to the world markets were staggering.

Next let's examine the so called "Nader Issue". One clever reader noted "Gore would have won handily if graz hadn't stolen all those votes away!" This reader also wished to remain anonymous obviously fearing the response from the vindictive graz campaign machine. One could also make the same arguement for Bush. Clearly, this misses the key point: I would have won handily if Gore/Bush hadn't stolen all those votes!

I've learned two valuable lessons from this Poll. The first is not to allow those other pesky candidates. That would ensure my victory and promote ballot simplicity. Two worthy goals.

The second involves one person, one vote or one IP, one vote. I've considered limiting each IP address to one vote. That doesn't take into account people behind proxy servers though. Since the IP address that voted 48 times is assigned to a large U.S. automobile manufacturer (you know who you are) it's possible that I have 48 readers there. Possible . . . but unlikely. I'll have to think about this one a little more.

So gentle readers . . . my sincere thanks for all your votes and all the time spent looking at the site. I'll put a new poll up Monday to give you all a chance to totally h4x0r this one. Have a happy Thanksgiving (in America anyway) and try not to take anything you read too seriously.

-graz