More than 60,000 votes in a day? Ummm, that doesn't sound right
|
| Seriously? I mean, seriously? |
| Buy Kane County Chronicle Photos » |
As of 6:11 p.m. Tuesday night, more than 31,000 people had voted in our daily Web poll – "Who do you want to win the 14th Congressional District Republican primary?" If this sounds like an extraordinarily high number to you, well, it is. One might even say it's an extraordinarily unlikely high number.
We average about 100 votes with our Web polls. Interesting questions sometimes pull in as many as 200 votes. In a one minute span from 6:07 to 6:08 p.m., Tuesday's Web poll reported 94 votes. From 6:09 to 6:10 p.m., it reported 80 votes. And as much as I would love to believe that many people are visiting and voting in our Web poll, it's simply not true.
So, I can conclude that either candidates Ethan Hastert and Mark Vargas – the biggest beneficiaries of the votes so far – were getting finger cramps from pressing the vote button multiple times (unlikely – and I certainly hope not) or that some supporter or bored college kid figured out a way to manipulate our Web poll.
Who knows what happened. All I know is it's now 6:20 and there are more than 31,500 votes. Five hundred votes in eight minutes. I've heard of Chicago politics and dead people voting, but non-existent, invisible Web people? I just hope they don't let them into the polls in February. As do candidates Jeff Danklefsen, Randall M. Hultgren and Jim Purcell, who seem to have a ways to go in courting the non-existent, invisible Web people bloc.
UPDATE – It's now 7:58 p.m. We just reached 37,250 votes. I'm hoping by the end of the night we have more votes than 14th District voters. It could happen. Maybe this is how hurt sports athletes make All-Star teams.
FINAL UPDATE – It's 12:30 a.m. on Wednesday. I took a screen shot of the final vote before I took it down and put up a new Web poll. Final tally: 62,037 votes. We didn't even have that many page views on Tuesday. And our page views on Tuesday showed that it was a fairly average day for us. Craziest thing I've ever seen with one of our Web polls.
