Friday night, CNN asked folks to vote in their online poll as to who they believe won the contest and said they'd report the results later. They then proceeded to ignore those results and never report them because, as you can see, Kerry won by an incredible margin. Obviously, someone decided that it represented well-organized voting and probably some software-fiddling from folks who know how to vote multiple times and/or configure a "bot" (robot) to vote repeatedly. And that someone was probably right.
So what I want to ask is: When are we going to get rid of these stupid, easy-to-rig online polls? Okay, pro-Kerry folks managed to stuff this ballot box until it was obvious…but doesn't this kind of stuffing go on to some degree in any online poll that deals with any topic anyone cares about? If the people who ran Kerry up to 94% in this poll had stopped at 62%, CNN would have reported this poll as if it meant something. More to the point, aren't they well aware that most polls are "stuffed" this way by advocates of all sorts of views? Isn't what happened here that the phony poll came out a little too phony to report? The disclaimer on all votes reads…
This QuickVote is not scientific and reflects the opinions of only those Internet users who have chosen to participate. The results cannot be assumed to represent the opinions of Internet users in general, nor the public as a whole. The QuickVote sponsor is not responsible for content, functionality or the opinions expressed therein.
Okay, it doesn't represent the opinion of the public. It doesn't even represent the opinions of Internet users. What are we pretending this does represent? If the results of this one weren't worth reporting because they were obviously phony, why report the results of the ones that are only a bit less phony?
I know why they run these. They like the idea of drawing people, even vote-stuffers, to their site and tallying all those clicks. But a news organization (and almost all of them do this) shouldn't be presenting a poll that looks like news when they know it really isn't. They already have enough of that kind of reporting when they do the headlines.