The Real All-Star Action's In The Voting
from the game-on dept
Pro sports' all-star games tend to be pretty tepid affairs, but more and more fans are taking the voting for the games seriously -- perhaps a little too seriously. Once upon a time, I remember that you had to actually go to a major-league baseball game to be able to vote for the all-star team, and ballot-stuffing meant grabbing as many paper ballots as you could find and punching out the baseball-shaped chads for your favorite players. But with leagues expanding voting online and to mobile phones, electronic ballot-stuffing is getting much easier, and becoming much more commonplace. The latest incident involves the Montreal Canadiens hockey team, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. Fans decided a fitting way to celebrate would be to have an all-Canadiens starting lineup at the all-star game, so they put their automated-voting scripts to work.This irked Pittsburgh Penguins fans, as it would keep the league's two leading scorers -- both Penguins, natch -- off the ice for the start of the game. So the Penguins encouraged their fans to vote via text message, which lets fans vote for all of a team's players at once, to great effect: the two players in question now rank 1 and 2 in voting. The NHL has already tossed out a large number of votes placed by the automated scripts, and beefed up its protections against them. While the leagues are obviously looking to expand the pool of all-star voters, particularly to international fans, they need to take great care to protect the integrity of the voting process. Even though most fans would probably agree that, in the grand scheme of things, the all-star games are good for little more than a laugh, their apathy is easily turned to outrage when they feel like their favorite team or player's been shortchanged. Also, anything that further undermines the games' value in fans' eyes could hamper their value to the leagues as money-spinners, a lesson worth learning for any company that does online voting. One possible solution: have Diebold run the all-star voting, since it seems like they might lose plenty of votes anyway.
