Politics from the Palouse to Puget Sound

Monday, June 30, 2008

Say What?

Jana (Lien, formerly of Pullman, now living on the west side and working for Amazon.com,) once compared Pullman to "Pottersville" of "It's a Wonderful Life" fame. She posted the following comment today on Dnews.com about the recent Wal-Mart poll:
If you didn't notice, the recent daily news poll let anyone vote more than once. You could sit there all day and skew the numbers, if you wanted. It's not a valid tool for supporting your case.
Really? I wonder if Jana noted that the PARD petition let anyone sign it more than once, particularly if they used more than one name, and allowed people from as far away as Australia sign? That was convenient for PARD, as real petitions require that the signer be a registered voter in the locality or state involved so that the signature can be verified. For all we know, PARD members sat around and filled in the names.

So does Jana consider the PARD petition a "valid tool" for supporting their case? I'll bet she does, as she sent in a letter to the editor blasting Wal-Mart and has a link to PARD's website on her blog.

Power to the people. Right, except when your ox is being gored.

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2 comments:

Mattwi said...

Sure enough people can vote more than once, but anyone running a poll on a website that is smart enough to run a poll can also easily recognize that the same IP address or group of addresses is voting more than once, they can also track back to linked polls hosted on sites other than the poll owners site...

This is pretty common stuff that most webmasters know about.

Jana, go back to your Lattes on the West side... Poll fraud is a non-issue...

April E. Coggins said...

Unlike the PARD petition, the Daily News poll gave people a choice. I would like to know how many people refused to sign PARD's petition and why it took them over two years to get 10,000 signatures in a college town with 18,000 students. I would be surprised if 3,000 of the signers still live in Pullman.