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I watched a guy do this once and anyone who is proficient at Visual Basic could construct a routine which can "vote" literally a few hundred times a minute. The thing is that he pulled this on a commercial site poll for something inconsequential AND he knew the guy who owned the site.

Still, all it takes is to develop a routine that enters the vote and then clears whatever barrier that is sent back to the voting "person" who just entered the vote - usually a cookie.

He showed me how he was able to throttle the voting to such a pace as it would look somewhat natural and told me the owner of the site would not be that much wiser unless they compared the logs of the server to the total number of votes - which they didn't.

The best way to combat this kind of hacker-type fraud would be NOT to try to fight fire with fire and have a routine cast competing votes but to go whole hog and place an astronomical amount of votes FOR John Kerry in the polling. Render the results useless. Give the programmers at the site fits trying to prevent it from happening again (you think the people who pay these people to design the polls want their money wasted which is what essentially happens when the polls are made nuull and void by bot "fraud"?). What you end up with doesn't negate "freeping" when you broadcast the existence of the poll to a large audience BUT it will eventually make such scripting tough if not impossible.