Although I have doubted the claims that Ron Paul supporters somehow spam every poll except those telephone polls of “likely Republican voters,” his numbers do seem bizarrely inflated. I find it difficult to believe that any Republocrat candidate in America could receive 80%+ of the vote on general interest web sites like 600 WREC‘s. I’m willing to entertain the idea that someone out there is using some kind of automated tool to hack the polls in Paul’s favor. He is definitely a favorite among many techies, myself included.
Pajamas Media went so far as to remove Paul’s name from their on-line polls. That’s why I removed their poll from this site. Their site implies that the number of weekly votes dropped by as many as tens of thousands due to voter frustration at the Paulbots.* If spammers were still actively attacking the polls while other voters drifted off, Paul’s percentages should have gone to 99% and stayed there until he was removed. That didn’t happen. Whenever Paul was included in poll–which certainly wasn’t always–his numbers remained between 35% and 50%.
Paul is back in their polls now. They have added an anti-spamming feature known as a captcha. Spammers have found ways around early captcha systems; all security systems are eventually broken. That could be the case here, but considering PM’s previously rabid anti-Paul rhetoric, I presume that they are using the latest and greatest in anti-spam techniques. Unless, of course, they deliberately left themselves an out in case Paul continued to out-poll everyone else.
The results? As of this moment Ron Paul is ranked number one with 41% of the votes for all polling places. 36% last week and 38% the week before that, always in first place. Part of their problem might be that they allow every visitor to vote for a Democrat and a Republican. I don’t think so, though, because so far there are 201 votes for Republican candidates and only 86 for Democrats. Bill Richardson is consistently the top candidate with Obama not far behind. Clinton barely registers. That tells me that Democrats are not participating in PM’s poll in significant numbers.
The logical conclusion seems to be that, among politically interested right-leaning Internet users, Ron Paul is indeed the leading candidate.
*The number of votes has dropped, but “tens of thousands” appears to be a slight exaggeration. At the very start, the voting peaked at around 19,000 combined Republocrat votes, probably representing fewer than 12,000 individual ballots cast. Many of those ballots could have been the result of a “vote early, vote often” philosophy. That lasted about two weeks. Subsequent polling periods rarely exceeded 6,000 votes. Recent weeks have remained steady at around 1,000 to 1,300 combined votes.
Technorati Tags: ron paul, spam, spammers, pajamas media, polls
“The logical conclusion seems to be that, among politically interested right-leaning Internet users, Ron Paul is indeed the leading candidate.”
Jay, I think this is exactly the right conclusion to draw. It seems to me, though, that this is a conclusion that many on the right–and even more specifically, those in the right leaning “old” blogosphere (those who are pre-Revolution)–are having trouble coming to terms with. Whether the preferences or Internet users translates into votes in the primaries and caucuses, we’ll start to see in 10 days. But it seems a bit incomprehensible to me that they would have trouble understanding that those who use the Internet place a high value on liberty and would be disproportionately attracted to the one candidate who wants to protect liberty.
I remember going to the Pajamas media site and voting early on for RP and watching the machinations that they would go thru trying to exclude him from their polls.
In fact, they used to have a forum over there and the candidate that would get the most discussion in that forum was Ron Paul.
At first, Ron Paul looked like an ideal candidate. But the more I looked at what he was saying, the less I believed it. He’s portrayed as too good to be true. So, he can’t possibly be true. That, and his foreign policy ideas are simply dangerous.
I endorse no one, because I have significant differences of opinion with ALL the candidates, but I believe I’m going to vote for Fred Thompson, since I think he is the candidate most likely to leave me alone.
I’ve been familiar with Ron Paul for almost 20 years, and he does seem almost too good to be true. I have an instinctual distrust of anyone who wins a public election. Although I agree with just about every one of Paul’s platform planks, I am certain that we disagree on some major personal issues. Fortunately, I don’t really care about that. I’d vote for a Unitarian Universalist if he promised to get the government to leave people alone. To my mind, Paul’s the only one of these candidates who has proven himself on that score.
I’ve seen a lot of people decry Paul’s foreign policy, but I’m not sure what exactly they find objectionable. He is not an isolationist, nor is he a pacifist. That doesn’t mean you’re wrong, Egghead. It just means I haven’t seen the same thing. What specifically do you find dangerous?