Cheaters Never Win
A team of us have been working all day, and we’re pretty confident we’ve cleaned up all the fraudulent voting. Here is what we did:
- Multiple votes from the same address do not count (this didn’t actually happen, but some of you were concerned).
- Pattern based emails (XXX1@ownmail.net, XXX2@ownmail.net, etc.) do not count.
- There were a couple of instances where schools were using more sophisticated methods of cheating. We didn’t count any votes from these instances.
- Through the entire process we made sure that the votes of anyone who was a ONE member before voting started was counted in the final tally.
With these fixes in place you should be able to see the new vote totals shortly. Voting will count for 60% of the final score.
Thanks to everyone for sticking with us today and coming together as a community dedicated to the fight against poverty.
April 4th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
Points weren’t removed for being from the same computer, where they? We’ve had “voting stations” going non-stop the past two days from student’s personal laptops, as well as the computer labs on campus – many of the votes would have certainly come from the same computers. Any word on this?
April 4th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
I don’t understand why the schools that cheated aren’t receiving some type of penalty. They added thousands of fraudulent votes and may still be using other methods to cheat that may not be detectable.
April 4th, 2008 at 8:03 pm
mvfazzino – We took into account that you guys would be tabling, no need to worry about that.
Craig – The groups themselves weren’t cheating, in fact in one case the campus leader was the one who brought the voting irregularities to our attention. We decided that we shouldn’t punish everyone because a couple of folks (who might not even have been associated with the group) decided to break the rules. Also, pretty much every campus had a little bit of cheating going on.
April 4th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
Thanks for sorting everything out, I’m sure you all were very fair. Thanks!
April 4th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
ok – so last night at @ 12 o’clcok sacred heart and unlv were going back and forth for 1st & 2nd – I woke to find an unvbelievable amount of votes came for unlv and princeton overnight to the tune of over 10,000+ what they already had. How come in rectifing this, sacred heat was cut in half from the votes at midnight last night and UNLV which was about the same amount + / – 50 at the time , still has over 5,000. I don’t see how schools could cheat beside the bots, I tried to vote twice not knowing you couldn’t, and noticed the vote didn’t count. So who looked at the bot votes from princeton and unlv and how come sacred heart with no bot votes came up with 1/2 their votes?…..Just wondering…thanks
April 4th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
The Whole contest has been tarnished by cheating. Even though you say it’s been resolved, who can believe what happened and the so called result!!!!! Eliminate the popular vote – this is ridiculous, the whole contest is corrupt now. It’s a sharme that something that is to be done for the better of mankind ends up corrupt by mankind!!!!!
April 4th, 2008 at 10:08 pm
So you’re saying if two people (my wife & I, who are grandparents and not into this stuff) share an e-mail address and vote with different names, the second vote doesn’t count? That doesn’t seem right especially since I cpopuldn’t find rules about voting and using one address more than once…maybe next time you should specify 1 e-mail address – -one vote.
April 4th, 2008 at 11:04 pm
when will they announce the winner of the entire competition?
April 4th, 2008 at 11:17 pm
They had originally said April 8th, but that may change…
April 5th, 2008 at 12:16 am
Bob, Sean, Christine – ONE membership is based on email, so every member gets a vote. We have essentially trimmed down the votes to one per-ONE member, as fair an honest a system as I think you could ask for. With the best tech folks in the business, I am very confident that the final vote totals will accurately reflect the number of people voting for a project.
Yup, announcing a winner on Tuesday the 8th.
April 5th, 2008 at 9:01 am
I agree with Sean. The vote by professionals should count more than the popular vote. Kids are kids and the pressure of wanting to win has preceded the purpose of the whole competition. Don’t forget the purpose of the campaign. Look at the end result of the projects! Who was helped more with the $1000, and who used it most effectively. It’s a clear cut decision. Kudos to all the young adults nationwide who have worked over the year to bring awareness to their respective schools.
April 5th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
This is why the ONE Campus Challenge is stupid. All the ONE members I know are 20x more concerned about making themselves look good by getting ahead in the competition than by actually fighting poverty in tangible ways. I am very disillusioned with the ONE campaign, and the fact so many people are cheating does not surprise me. i will work elsewhere to fight poverty.
April 5th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
To Student: I’m incredibly frustrated by the fraudulent voting, too, but I’m not going to leave the campaign! Perhaps you’ve become disillusioned by only a select few; most likely, your exposure to ONE and its members has been limited to this competition. I’ve had the honor to go to the Power 100 Summit–on my own money, mind you–and was deeply impressed and moved by everyone’s dedication to the campaign OUTSIDE of the OCC. Only 10 schools were in the running to win at the end, but hundreds were participating in the competition from the beginning. And those schools continue to act and hold events and make phone calls, regardless of their place in the rankings. My own school was in the top 20, not the top 10, but we’re still making noise on campus. We’re still moving forward in the fight against poverty, and you should too.
But I am worried about one thing: what about a single person signing up with multiple email addresses? I’ve just used the one for this, but I technically could sign up and vote 3 more times. You can’t tell who the address belongs to, and I could use a fake name.
April 5th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
To Ellie and the rest, there is only so much these people can do to prevent the cheating. If someone signs up for multiple e-mail addresses JUST for the purpose of cheating, we’re assuming a lot, not to mention that’s a lot of effort. I’m guessing that by the 20th sign-up they’d be tired.
As for the rest of people saying that cheating on this poll has completely tarnished the ONE campaign, etc—what’s really disappointing is that you show such a lack of commitment. Something like this shouldn’t discourage those who are truly wanting to make a difference. With campaigns like this one come difficulties…this one has been the least of them.
To the others who are still excited: go ONE!
April 5th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
It’s not fair that larger schools who are winning just because they have a much larger student population. The schools that have been winning all along by helping in the community and trying to get people involved in ONE are just left in the dust. It is very disappointing.
April 5th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Mary, I am the campus leader at GW. We have around 12,000 to 13,000 students on our campus which makes us a medium sized school and one of the largest left in the top 10. I have to say it is incredibly difficult to recruit students to do anything on larger campuses. I cannot speak for other larger schools, but at GW, we have probably 30-40 student service organizations (among the 300-400 regular orgs). At least one of these service orgs can be found holding an event almost every week which deal with the same issues that ONE tries to raise awareness about. The student body becomes weary and unaffected by so many events regarding the same issue. Although we have a larger student body, it’s very difficult to actually get those students to participate in your organization because there are so many others with similar goals. Also, large campuses are rather disconnected. Really what should be done, is for all these service organizations which overlap to concentrate their resources on a couple large events throughout the year. However, we all know that’s not how it works. So, we larger campuses do have more people, but also have challenges of our own.
April 5th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
I concur with everything Ryan said. I am the leader at K-State, a school with an enrollment of 23,000 and over 450 organizations. It is extremely difficult to get people to even acknowledge that you exist, let alone do anything.
I came from a school with an enrollment of about 6,000. As one walked across the campus there, you could actually “feel” the heart fo the campus. Here…you are just another person with another cause…
April 6th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
I am the leader of Wilmington College with 1200 students and 30 organizations. This is a very difficult amount to stack up against K-State and GW, but I don’t feel cheated or outcast by the voting system. It was and is a little disheartening to know that we have to be put in a running vote with campuses who have such a large population and did have so many more recruits than Wilmington. However, the rules of the competition and voting were spelled out very clearly. If I am correct (and I am pretty sure that I am) WIlmington was the smallest school in the top 10. Everyone on campus knew about ONE, the challenge, the organization, our members, and it will continue to be a stable organization at WC regardless of what happens within the final days of the OCC!