BAZOMBO: a discursive miscellany of topics

How to manage an online vote

Tuesday, September 25 2007

This story is both amazing and unsurprising.

…TVNZ said it had found “voting irregularities” in the ballots cast by members of the public.

Voting had closed for the competition, but during the routine check of the emailed ballots, it was found some had come from invalid email addresses, or without the authorisation of the owners of the email addresses.As a result, TVNZ had to invalidate the vote, and start again with a fresh system.

It’s amazing that TVNZ would go with a simple vote via email. Someone in the organisation must know that you cannot, over the normal internet infrastructure, rely on an email being from its ostensible sender. Don’t they get spam at TVNZ?

It’s unsurprising that people would game such a wide-open system, when the prize is worthwhile.

Details of the false emails have been referred to the police.

If I were accused of vote fraud in this competition, my first defence would be that no one could be expected to take such a stupid system seriously.

Now, how would I do it? Set up a website that sends a message to the user asking them to confirm their vote by pointing their web browser at a URL with a unique code. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Far, far harder to defraud, and surely cheaper and less annoying to users than rejigging the competition and engaging someone to set up a txt-based service.

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Tags: email ~ tvnz ~ bad design ~ software

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