Was Bardstown’s loss in magazine’s contest due to voting ‘irregularities’?

By JIM BROOKS
Nelson County Gazette

Friday, March 28, 2014, 9:30 p.m. — Bardstown failed to beat Florence, Ala., in the second round of voting this week in the Garden & Gun magazine “Greatest Southern Towns Bracket” challenge.

The loss has a lot of local people who voted in the challenge wondering exactly how Bardstown lost — especially considering that Bardstown was ahead in the voting late Thursday.

The disappointment Friday rippled all across social media, with a lot of people asking the question, “How did that happen?”

The question was posed to the magazine, and the responses made it clear the magazine was evaluating votes cast with an eye toward stopping cheaters from giving a city an unfair advantage.

“In an effort to keep the bracket as fair as possible, voting is not final until all tallies have been reviewed for inconsistencies and irregularities by our tech team. Any suspicious votes are removed before announcing the winner of the matchup,” the magazine posted in a social media response.

“We appreciate the passion people have for their communities and can assure you we are not playing favorites. We’re simply trying to keep the voting fair,” the response said.

People could vote more than once a day using different computers and devices, but were not allowed to vote multiple times each day from the same device. If you tried to vote twice, you received a message that thanked you for your vote but didn’t record it a second time.

But voting twice from the same computer — repeatedly — was very easy to do. So easy that it appears the magazine was aware of it, and removed votes it deemed “suspicious” or “irregular.”

When you visited the magazine’s website to vote, it  created a web browser “cookie” — a small piece of data stored in a user’s web browser that lets the website know the user’s previous activity on the site. In the case of the Greatest Southern Town Bracket contest, the cookie apparently recorded when you cast a vote for each city in the bracket.

With that knowledge, all that was necessary to vote multiple times from the same computer was to clear the web browser’s cookies after casting each vote. And while erasing the browser cookies would allow multiple votes, the vote (or votes) would be connected with the same IP address recorded in the server’s log files. Apparently, the website’s tech team analyzed those server logs looking for “inconsistencies” in the votes cast.

The magazine’s statement was little consolation for those who worked to encourage people to vote and advance Bardstown in the bracket challenge.

“We were robbed!” one Facebook user commented Friday morning about the loss. One social media user suggested, “Garden & Gun must be using Common Core math to arrive at that decision.”

One can only hope that other community vote tallies during the voting were adjusted if they too were afflicted by “irregularities.”

Despite all the complaints about losing out in the vote, the real winner in this contest has nothing to do with any of the towns in the bracket. The winner here is Garden & Gun magazine, whose web traffic undoubtedly experienced a major spike given the hundreds of thousands of votes cast in the contest to date. And I’m willing to bet the majority of those who voted had never heard of Garden & Gun magazine.

In the meantime, we can all enjoy watching how the contest continues for the remaining Southern cities. May the best team win.

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