Vote in the late night Presidential poll. Please vote only once.
One of my Christmas wishes is that it will become possible to conduct online 2008 polls that prevent poll stuffing. In particular, I would love to have the ability to conduct a poll where it is only possible to vote when you are signed in at MyDD, with each member only voting once, and when only those people who were members for at least a week can vote. If such a poll were possible, then I might conduct a straw poll every month (or even more frequently), starting now.
Alas, such a poll is not possible, and does not exist. Thus, I am forced to take drastic measures, and instead conduct
a 2008 straw poll during the middle of the night, when I suspect few people will be around to stuff the poll. I do not expect that this will solve the problem completely, but the MyDD electorate from 2 a.m. eastern until 9 a.m. eastern should be pretty much unstuffable.
It isn't that I think stuffing is wrong. On a moral level, there is nothing wrong with it at all. It is just that I would love to see what regular readers of MyDD actually think about the 2008 Democratic primaries. Please, I urge you, do not taint this poll by sending your blog readers, you email list, your MySpace group, your Facebook group, or your Yahoo group to alter the results. Think about this for a moment--wouldn't it be better to know where your candidate stands among MyDD readers, than it would to overtly skew the results of a poll to make it seem as though MyDD readers are behind your candidate when, in fact, they are not? Don't you want to know where you candidate actually stands among MyDD readers? If I were behind one candidate, I would want to know where my candidate stood. Skewing the results tells you nothing except that you are able to skew the results.
Vote.
Anyway, you can't skew the results without my knowing. I have access to every vote made in polls like this, including a history of votes in chronological order, and as such I know when stuffing is taking place. Whether that stuffing is for Clark, Edwards, Feingold, Richardson, Bayh, Gore or whoever (I have seen stuffing on behalf of every candidate I named), is it really more useful to you to have me broadcast on the front page of MyDD that you stuffed the poll than it is to know where your candidate stands among the potential contenders? Please tell me it is not.
So, anyway,
go vote in the late night Presidential poll. I plan to pull the links when I wake up. I just want to know where the community actually stands on 2008 right now. Rest assured, if you stuff it while I sleep, I will know you did so. Please, just let the poll run its course. Information like this is almost impossible to come by. Let us just have a brief moment where we can know where the community stands. I beg you--vote in the poll, don't stuff the poll. I would hope that at this point we would be more mature than freepers, and that the pursuit of useful political information would trump the desire to childishly make your voice the only one that is heard.
Vote.
Update: OK, bedtime. Arond 140 votes are in. I am already suspicious of stuffing taking place. We will have to see what it look like in the morning. I really hopes this works and people are respectful of the process. Until then...
