EDIT: NVM ESPN's traditions poll is shut down for now due to tampering
It had only made it to 82 million votes, I don't know WHY they would think that's tampering. 
EDITORS NOTE: Due to poll tampering that has led to technical issues, the Championship Round has been shut down and the votes cast since the round opened have been thrown out. Voting will reset and move to SportsNation's Facebook page on Friday, July 8.
EDITORS NOTE: Due to poll tampering that has led to technical issues, the Championship Round has been shut down and the votes cast since the round opened have been thrown out. Voting will reset and move to SportsNation's Facebook page on Friday, July 8.
The 2010 presidential election drew out more voters than average, and around 88 million people voted. Seems interesting that an online poll for a college football tradition can match that so easily. Puts Obama and McCain in their place I guess, but seems a little suspicious, no ?
rockydude, I'm assuming you're joking. Bots have been inflating vote totals since at least the semi-finals. May want to edit in the old "/s"
He can't edit it now. Way to go.
There was no 2010 presidential election.
Also, the vote totals in the last presidential election have a pretty obvious explanation:
Two years off, but the point remains - pretty darn good vote total for a football poll. I wonder when the voting did go from real to bot though . . . .
Nebraska was pretty blatantly using them as early as the first round. There's a good chance other schools (including Michigan) were using them in a more subtle manner for a while; think "1960's Chicago election." Things only reached "Iraq under Saddam Hussein/Kim Jong Il in North Korea" voting ridiculousness levels in the last two rounds.
The whole reason I wrote the bot for Nebraska was to troll the idiots posting on the espn comments in the first place. Trying to be sneaky about botting votes in doesn't do that.
Lets just put it this way: if an online poll allows you to vote more then once by deleting a cookie or switching to private browsing someone can write a program that does essentially the same thing. It's been going on on espn's site for years. I guess it finally became so obviously widespread that it crossed the threshold where espn realized it wasn't just goofy college kids rigging a poll but instead a giant self-created DDoS.
"Maybe in Ohio, but not in America!"...classic
Don't blame ME. I voted for Kodos!
That's cool and all but, as already said, the election was in 2008 and not 2010. To add to the list, the election had close to 130 million votes, not 88 million.
LOL
those fsu bots i tell ya
This has been very amusing. I work in upstate NY and some of my co-workers have been asking me for updates b/c none of us ever heard of voting bots til I told them about the Nebraska bracket.
You can make a bot do pretty much anything. I've made money before by botting Runescape and selling the gold/accounts. I actually played when I was like 11 and people are weird and actually pay money for accounts I botted along with 9 others at a time on a spare PC.
"82 million votes? That seems high. Not like last round, which had a very reasonable 25 million votes..."
in under 2 days. I wonder what their problem is anyways?
Good that whole bot thing was getting a little old.
Anyone know what the distribution was? I'd hope the Michigan bots were winning.
We need to win this.
Michigan EECS wins! (And will again if we are needed on the Facebook poll. We beat cheating by cheating better.)
From Bo's heart to your post good sir.
Remember his old saying, "Win, win at all costs, bring me your steroid-riddled linebackers, those who don't attend class, and just dress Charles Woodson again but name him Chuck Wooder and tell everyone he's a walk-on from Petosky."
Unfortunately, I think it'll be a bit harder to cheat the facebook poll -- at bare minimum, you'll probably need a facebook account to vote.
Not worth cheating. I'd rather lose.
Just let it go. Prom court was decades ago.
there is a possible free ncaa football game for me on the line here and cheating has no true cost. Totally worth cheating.
just got a note highlighting a study from USC that basically, people are twice as likely to cheat if the benefits are split with another person.
Other related reports highlighted on that "SciVerse" page that various schools of higher learning may want to take a look at:
"Unable to resist temptation: How self-control depletion promotes unethical behavior" (authors from Harvard, Univ of Penn, Duke)
"Lack of sleep and unethical conduct" (authors from Va Tech, MSU, Hawaii)
"The abundance effect: Unethical behavior in the presence of wealth" (authors from UNC, Wash Univ-St. Louis)
"When misconduct goes unnoticed: The acceptability of gradual erosion in others’ unethical behavior" (authors from UNC, Harvard)
Does anybody know who was leading when they pulled the plug?
Michigan was getting beat badly, like 70/30 or something. I think after it froze up at 22 million, a lot of the Michigan people may have stopped their bots and the FSU ones kept it up.
Jordan Kovacs.
Oops....wrong poll - my bad.
We were so young, and so nieve...
Do you know who won that one, Mgrow?
But Kovacs was up huge on the last day. He had something like a 60-25 lead on the ND safety, with everyone else in single digits
I think it is really ACORN's fault. They were picking up the homeless and the hopeless and driving them to internet cafes and libraries just to vote on this topic.
This just means our eecs majors need to step up their game and hack facebook. This is probably a homework assignment for the eecs at summer school. Wouldnt surprise me after some of the homeworks id gotten while at michigan. GO BLUE! were not just good football
Hey just cuz a bot is voting a million times I still feel like my 1 measly vote mattered. Now give me a sticker that I can show off to everyone to say I voted.
What they missed out on was the previous rounds of cheating.
just have to figure out how to hack facebook