Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Serious freeping going on at BosMag

By

A source at Boston Magazine tells BMG News that their front page polls typically generate about 200 responses, and NEVER more than 500.

So far, the much remarked–upon Gov poll has generated nearly 12,000 responses, nearly 25 times their previous record.  (And yes, Gabs is still way ahead.)

Add to that the fact (which I verified myself) that a single individual can vote multiple times in that poll, and you are left with – in the words of my BosMag source – “something strange indeed.”

Theories?  Time to break out the tinfoil hats?

UPDATE: Perhaps as a result of … well, I don’t know what, the Patrick freepers are out in full force on this silly thing!  Latest results:

Total Votes: 22365 [over 10,000 more votes than last night. –ed.]

Chris Gabrieli

32% (7234)

Deval Patrick

65% (14483)

Tom Reilly

1% (213)

None of the above

2% (435)

Geez, haven’t these people got something better to do?

Please share widely!
fb-share-icon
Tweet
0

Comments

  4. if you assume that Reilly’s folks aren’t voting more than once, and that the three candidates are [i]about[/i] equal in the running, then you’ve got:

    <

    p>
    208 Reilly X 3 = 624
    417 None of the above.

    <

    p>
    Total: approximately 1000.  That means the other 11,000 votes are bogus.

    <

    p>
    Not only is it a bad poll, but when bad data is 11 times more common than good data, the poll is really, really worthless… unless you can take some psychosomatic inferences, like Gabs’ supporters have an inferiority complex, Reilly supporters are too busy doing voter ID and GOTV to care about boston magazine polls, DP supporters aren’t as good at hacking polls as Gabs’ supporters, etc.  đŸ˜€

    • maybe the only ones who feel the need to freep polls and then blatantly portray the results as proof of something meaningful are Gabrielites?

      • Check out the string of posts on this “poll” last week and you will see that it was FIRST touted by a Deval Patrick supporter when he was winning the “poll”.  It was then posted by a Gabrieli suppporter when he had the lead. 

  6. They don’t even set a cookie.  All you need to do is hit refresh on the main page.

    <

    p>
    As I said before, I can write a perl script that would vote as often as their server could process one if I felt like it.  It’s not hard to do.

    <

    p>
    The Globe poll is a little better, but again, it only sets a cookie, which you can delete.  Again, if I thought it was worthwhile, I could write a script to rig the votes.

    <

    p>
    If I had to guess, I would say that most of the votes for either candidate are coming from the same IP address.

  7. Looks like everyone is playing this game!!!  Except for Reily.  Is any playing anything for Reily???  His candidacy is slowing circling the drain…..

  8. Wow –
    That is a lot of work if someone is doing that by themselves!!  Imagine the blood in the fingers from hitting the refresh button so frequently! 

    <

    p>
    Good job on the program or the poor interns at the DP HQ…

    • But someone did.

      <

      p>
      And good for them.  The more obviously rigged these internet polls are, the less likely it is that anyone will care about them.

Archives