Ever since the dawn of voting-based reality television like American Idol, and the emergence of near-universal internet access, online voting has become a tool to increase publicity and promote events. There have been online votes for contests far ranging, ranking the most important people to deciding concert destinations for recording artists. In theory, it lets the people decide what they believe is the best alternative offered.
What works in theory does not work in reality, and over the past few years I have been convinced that online polls simply don't work. The Time Magazine poll for the 100 most influential people was hacked to name a minor internet celebrity to first place and spell a message with the remaining candidate's names. Justin Bieber had the world converge to suggest North Korea as part of his world tour - something which is especially notable since next to nobody in North Korea could access the poll. Even I successfully fixed a poll with some friends at one point, in order to get a very unattractive old man a spread in a British magazine for teenaged girls. We were strange people with too much time on our hands.
I mention this not because of bitterness towards a certain small town in southern Saskatchewan, but because online polls are booming, and I wonder if people are realizing just how easy they are to hack and, in turn, how meaningless they end up being. In the realm of online votes, it's quite rare that the result is due to the will of the people, but more the will of one person or a small group who want to influence the votes.
I understand the motivation to do it, of course. It increases website traffic, gives an audience an illusion of involvement and allows for some quite elaborate contests as a result. Whether you're trying to ruin them for the sake of an incomprehensible joke or trying to garner votes yourself - I have been on both sides - it becomes easy to see what decides the winners.
Unfortunately, winners aren't decided on popularity or merit, but on the whims of a few. In a contest to win a vehicle in which I was a finalist, I found that the people who garnered the most votes didn't have the best entries, the most compelling arguments or even necessarily a reason to vote for them. The contest, which was built around constructing a small website, often had people with badly constructed disasters of a site getting hundreds of votes, while people who did a good job but had fewer pre-existing contacts did much worse. I'm not even referring to myself - I personally never expected a win - there were many talented people who were pushed aside and lost because someone had enough friends who knew how to stack the votes.
The online voting process simply doesn't work, and it's a shame when talented people and organizations are pushed aside because of a spoiler in their midst, one person with the right contacts. It's not fair to anyone involved in such a poll, win or lose. The losers have to deal with the results being completely out of their hands, but the winners - especially a surprise winner - also has plenty of doubt cast on their win. I can't help but think that, in spite of the large publicity generated, online polls might need to be sent to the scrap heap.
