The Voting IssuesLast night some overeager folks started running bots on the final voting system, giving thousands of votes to Princeton and UNLV. We’ve put up a use verification to stop the flow of fraudulent votes and are looking into the fairest way to fix this kerfuffle.
20 Responses to “The Voting Issues”Leave a Reply
AboutThe OCC Blog is a daily log of the ONE Campus Challenge, a friendly competition to determine which university's student body has the most effective global poverty-fighting campaign. The site is operated by ONE staff, Campus Outreach Ambassadors (COAs), and Campus Leaders. The content of each post represents the views of that post's author and does not necessarily reflect the views of ONE. ONE does not support or oppose any candidate for elected office, and any post expressing support or opposition for a candidate is not endorsed by ONE.
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April 4th, 2008 at 10:28 am
RECOUNT!
In all seriousness, maybe the popular vote just needs to be eliminated from the judging. It puts small schools at a huge disadvantage. And does anyone else think it’s odd that Sacred Heart’s 3,500 undergrads have voted 6,500 times? Basically, it looks like OCC asked for a high school style popularity contest and got all the garbage that comes along with it. Let’s let the ingenuity of the ONE groups on each campus decide this, not 20 people with computers and too much spare time.
April 4th, 2008 at 11:06 am
I would have to concur – as much as I love the electoral process and democracy, it seems like there is no fair way of conducting the voting so long as schools are using “bots” and other things. And, in Sacred Heart’s defense, we have a lot of community help – which incidentally is the goal of the OCC. Community outreach (meaning not staying in the confines of your respective school’s campuses) is exactly what SHU has done. We’ve been working really hard through the use of emails, posters, and calling to contact some of our 10,000 alumni, on top of the 4,00 undergrads, 500 faculty and staff, not to mention friends and family as well as the 100,000 Bridgeport natives. So, not to start a fight, but maybe we should focus more on fixing the problems we’re presented with in this voting instead of pointing fingers (sort of like, say, extreme poverty).
April 4th, 2008 at 11:13 am
Total disqualification, who knows what else they’re “fixing”!
April 4th, 2008 at 11:37 am
Ok I’m going to agree with Mike, no pointing fingers that anyone is “fixing” anything and nobody should be disqualified, that’s not fair to all the hard work they did.
I also agree that this process sort of create a popularity contest….I go to a school of 40,000 so I would definitely have a clear advantage over one of say, 3500. I think the ONE staffers be the ones to pick the winner since they will be unbiased and aware of everything ONE stands for, thus being able to choose who fulfilled ONE’s goals/standards most effectively.
April 4th, 2008 at 11:37 am
The voting should be based on the projects, not just the schools! I’m not a student at Sacred Heart, but they seem to have the best, most legitimate project. Who’s to say the other 2.4 million ONE members haven’t been voting for them as well? UNLV and Princeton shouldn’t have cheated – regardless of the size in their school.
Admin note: This comment came from a computer on the Sacred Heart University campus.
April 4th, 2008 at 11:39 am
i have to agree that we get rid of the popular vote. go on the judges decision of what fits into the guidelines set by OCC and best conforms to ONE Values. (awareness, engagement, etc) I’m sure more than Princeton and UNLV have had questionable practices. Let’s just get rid of the vote. The judges should know best. As for engagement, how many people are actually watching any project but their own school’s?
April 4th, 2008 at 11:54 am
I just want to point out that being at a “large” school is not the advantage that one might think. There is a serious disconnect on a larger campus (one with over 450 student groups). Everyone is “doing their own thing” and it is extremely difficult to get students to stop for even a second to acknowledge your existence. :0) My point of reference? I completed my undergrad at a small division II school…where you could actually “feel” the heart of the campus. “Large” campuses have a completely different feel to them.
As for this voting…as others have said, the judges (who are the experts in the field) should decide this…based solely on the projects themselves and not the schools or the people at the schools.
Just my 2 cents.
April 4th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
The whole point of this campaign is to raise awareness, and so the fact they used a bot to enter in names is dishonest and the fact they participated should be enough of a “prize” for those schools. The others, I assume did it honestly and should be recognized as such.
April 4th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
I go to a college that was involved in the ONE Campus Challenge, but didn’t make the top 10. As a school, our ONE club reviewed all of the projects. We have encouraged our entire campus to vote for Sacred Heart because their project was CLEARLY the best. We have been rallying votes for Sacred Heart as if it was our own school. It’s unfair to the schools with real votes that UNLV and Princeton have cheated. Why do they deserve to win?
Admin note: This comment came from a computer on the Sacred Heart University campus and from an email address of a user signed up with Sacred Heart for the ONE Campus Challenge.
April 4th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
First, I agree that the popular vote should be disregarded (this is not because my school is losing, haha). We just realized yesterday that one could go back onto the website and vote with the same exact information he/she used before and the system still recognized it as a vote. This truly makes it a rather skewed system for determining a winner. How do all of us know what is a real vote or doctored vote now? I agree with most of the people above in allowing the judges to determine the winner. They are impartial, knowledgable and should make the best decision.
Second, let’s not point fingers at schools or the individuals leading their schools. First and foremost, the point of this contest is to unite everyone involved in fighting poverty, not to start bickering about who did what. Most of the leaders have little or no control over what their students are doing as far as the online voting. If they did have a say in the cheating, then that is a different story. However, we all really have no idea what the story is. So, until we know more information, no one should cast a dark shadow on anyone’s name.
Finally, I’m really impressed with what everyone did!!! It’s really awesome to see how far the ONE Campus Challenge has come and how huge of an impact it has had. Keep up the good work everyone!!
April 4th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
Well, here’s the thing. If you are pushing for your school to vote for someone, not just your project, but someone else’s, then your are taking the people’s choice out. You have to be informed for your vote to truly count for something, at least you should.
Maybe we should be required to watch all 10 videos and read all 10 testimonies, before we get to the vote.
April 4th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
i dont think people should be attacking my school. I go to SHU and we didnt just raise awareness because we had been doing it all semester. WE DID SOMETHING. read the whole thing and see that we restocked an ENTIRE food pantry, sent over 500 letters to our Congressmen, and got the city of Bridgeport declared as a city of ONE. please just watch our video and dont hate on any of the schools. we all did our best and it isnt about competition its about giving back which is what everyone did.
April 4th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
This makes me feel like I’m back home in FL.
April 4th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
I don’t think anyone is trying to point fingers. All of the school’s have done great projects to help raise awareness of the ONE campaign and no one is calling that into question. And I agree completely with Ryan that we have no idea about how much “cheating” each school did in the voting or if any of the ONE groups at those schools were aware of the voting schemes.
April 4th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
Our proposal:
There are some obvious problems that have arisen from the popular vote, but many people have worked very hard to gather votes in the past few days, Therefore, the popular vote should be made less of a percentage of the final score.
Also, as it seems that other schools are reviewing and voting for projects, we would like to make everyone aware that Brandeis made a video, which was never posted by the ONE Campaign. Here’s the link:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5223489635180122212&q=extinguish+poverty&total=1&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0
April 4th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
http://www.one.org/campus/blog/2008/04/04/praise/
April 4th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
The top 2 schools who cheated should obviously be disqualified. Over night they gained over 13,000 votes, making it completely unfair to the schools who have real votes. They did a good job with their projects, but should have trusted that their projects were good enough to earn them real votes. They cheated. Plain and simple. Vote for the school YOU think had the best project.
April 4th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
I’m a student at UNLV who is very involved with encouraging people to vote, and I can tell you that our leaders had nothing to do with the fraudulent votes. Who is even stupid enough to jump up 13,000 votes, as the last comment says? I would like to think that we can get over this finger pointing business and throw out there that we DON’T know who did it. Did you ever think that maybe someone was trying to get UNLV and Princeton disqualified? With BLATANT cheating such as occurred last night?
Well, if you hadn’t thought of that, at least it’s been brought up now.
Thanks for reading.
April 4th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
Hey guys, just for the sake of keeping things honest: if you post a comment that appears to be false, I will contact you for clarification, and – failing a reply – will note inconsistencies in your statements here. The two in this thread are:
“Christina” above says, “I go to a college that was involved in the ONE Campus Challenge, but didn’t make the top 10.” This comment was posted from a computer on the Sacred Heart campus using an email address that is signed up as an SHU member in the Campus Challenge.
“Jimmy” about says, “I’m not a student at Sacred Heart, but they seem to have the best, most legitimate project.” This comment came from a computer on the Sacred Heart campus.
I don’t want to have to call anyone out, so please keep it honest guys.
April 5th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
Christina is a student who attends Rutgers University who is here visiting a friend at Sacred Heart this weekend. She is not from Sacred Heart. Don’t want people to ge the wrong idea!!