A message to Ron Paul supporters
Pajamas Media has a warning to supporters of Ron Paul:
In the last several days, in fact since the beginning of the Pajamas Media Straw Poll, PJM has received vastly more messages and phone calls from supporters of Ron Paul than from any other candidate, indeed from supporters of all the other candidates put together.Interestingly enough, Josh and Wikiman were talking about this tonight. Congressman Paul wins a lot of online polls, but they mean absolutely nothing. I am supporting Ron Paul, not because I think he can win, but because he is the only candidate that is interested in promoting liberty at home. My support is out of principle, as it usually is.In recent days – after votes were deducted from Mr. Paul’s total because, among other things, someone voted for Mr. Paul over 229 times from one IP within 72 minutes – these messages and calls have become increasingly rude and abusive, even threatening.
Vote in a poll, but don't be pissed when the site hosts kick our guy out because you vote 100 times for one candidate. Just knock it off.
Comments
Eh... it's typical to see minor party or second tier major party candidates score high in polls like the MSNBC online polls...
But in actual real polls Rep. Paul is still only pulling 1-2%.
I do however hope he continues to tear a new one into the other candidates of the War and Murder Party.
Posted by: Trev | May 9, 2007 01:35 AM
You should filter voting by IP addresses then. But people are going to do this because Joe Normal is going to think that, "hey, this guy on the net has a lot of points, I should look into him."
So think of it as a way of getting the word across. People are getting rude because they're frustrated at how they have no control over how the media presents the campaign.
Posted by: blog surfer | May 9, 2007 02:01 AM
He can win.
I'm not listening to you... (hands covering my ears) la - la - la - la - la.
Posted by: wikiman | May 9, 2007 07:53 AM
@blog surfer, Online polls will never be accurate unless the voters are randomly selected. Even then there are problems. Filtering IP addresses only makes it slightly more difficult to cast multiple votes. Worse, online communities get behind candidates and mob a poll. For example http://digg.com ran a story about Ron Paul being left off an ABC poll, so diggers wrote in RP so many times that it looks like RP is the only legitimate candidate. http://abcnews.go.com/politics/beseenbeheard/popup?id=3135373&POLL288=4000000
Posted by: wikiman | May 9, 2007 08:07 AM
Filtering by IP will only stop the lazy poll spammers. You can get around that limitation easily if you know what you're doing.
Posted by: G | May 17, 2007 12:56 PM