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Allow me to qualify my earlier comments. I’m not claiming that the polls being conducted on FR have been “spammed”. I’m mearly stating that for anyone who knows how, multiple votes could be cast. I know that this has been done on liberal websites, but I do not know that this occurs here. I’m like you in that I do not vote more than once on the polls conducted on FR. I hope that most on this site follows that same ethical behavior.

Well you know who we are gonna have to ask don’t you? I figure you should ask him since it was you who suggested the polls here could be spammed. Personally, I don’t like to bother him. But with a charge of this nature, I believe it deserves a response from the man who would know. So why don’t you ask him yourself to settle this?

I’m not claiming that the polls being conducted on FR have been “spammed”.

They can all be spammed unless you start to use unique identifiers (say a Paypal account but you can have more than one of those, or more than one credit card, or more than one phone number on landline or cellphone). On the web, it's even easier to cheat. You can use multiple accounts, delete cookies between votes, use IP spoofing software to anonymize your true IP address.

Personally, I've never heard of anyone getting away with it here at FR, maybe at most casting 2-3 votes. But there are probably still a few sleeper accounts but not many. Our mods are pretty alert. Let's see, folks can use both home and work computers to vote if they have multiple accounts, very easy. But the ability to rack up a huge number of votes this way is difficult for most people. And JimRob reads his server logs, no doubt noting IP addresses and probably has some Perl code to detect accounts with virtually no activity except for voting on polls. So, of course it can be done. But it would be hard to do and difficult to rack up that many votes without JimRob or JohnRob catching on.

Web polls at many media sites are ridiculously easy to freep (FR's non-member poll is like this). Just delete your cookie, change your IP address if necessary, vote again. Rinse, lather, repeat. UNIX and Linux geeks can write scripts to automate this easily as well. Not that I've detected any indications of anything other than some RP supporter posting about a poll on an RP blog or forum and then a minor Paulian Horde runs over there to "freep" that poll. And then they gloat about it, just like we used to. You know, FR used to be absolutely infamous for destroying poll credibility. The libmedia just hated our activity. So FReepers are hardly in any position to be taken seriously complaining that some Dirty Hippies have gone and ruined some nice little unscientific online poll. I would guess that FreeRepublic deliberately destroyed the credibility of thousands of online polls, perhaps even approaching ten thousand, during the pre-Bush era. There must have been a half-dozen of those threads every day.