Please vote and recommend!

jesse:

Do you really believe that ANYONE is going to 'change their mind' over this insipid poll that not one person in 1,000,000 would find without your pointing it out?

This problem is that this poll is not scientific in any way. They do not tell you how many people have voted and if you want to you can vote over and over again... so if you want to make it a project and vote a few hundred times. I get that we don't want PBS and NOW showing up with a poll like this and I know that it is going around because this is the third time I've seen it recommended in three different places. But you could just put a bunch of people in the room or use a program to vote over and over again to manipulate this poll.

I voted. But it's a frigging INTERNET poll. Last one I voted in I spent several anxious moments trying to decide if I'd rather see Paris Hilton or Lindsey Lohan in a new sex video....

This is such a waste of energy! Who cares? NEXT.

Do you have any evidence that the "right-wing" has "organized" a campaign to vote "Yes"?

Who cares!

BREAKING NEWS! Sean Hannity says bad things about Obama every night, and praises Sarah Palin! On FOX News, no less!

How is the Obama campaign going to respond? How CAN they respond? I know - let's mobilize and get as many people as possible to vote in some obscure, absurd online poll! That will finally silence the madding crowd at Free Republic, and swing this election in our favor!

For all of the reasons mentioned above, this poll is meaningless. As far as right-wing rigging is concerned, yes, Freep online forums began sending visitors over to PBS over the weekend to vote in this thing. So did other right-wing sites. That's easy to verify using the Google.

At the same time, a diarist at DailyKos wrote about the PBS poll on Saturday, and mobilized DK readers to "fight back," and other left-wing sites, including this one, followed suit. What is the difference, then, between "right wing rigging" and left wing rigging?

BTW, when I first looked at the PBS poll late Friday, I think it was, Palin was up 59-41, so the left wing GOTV has come a long way in the past couple of days.

More importantly, and speaking of "rigging," there is no evidence I can see that would indicate that one can vote as many times as one would like AND have all of their votes be counted. In any case, since there is NO vote total displayed at PBS, this assertion can't be proved.

Additionally, I have several sites that implement polls and that register votes/voters by IP address. Clearing cookies and caches or switching browsers doesn't allow for additional, discrete votes to be registered from a local computer, although my visitors can go through the motions of voting as many times as they like. That's just a function of the polling script. At my sites, the only way to allow multiple votes to be registered is to clear a given IP from the backend.

If you are still concerned about this (non)issue, then you should call up the PBS page containing the polling script and use one or another of the available developer's tools (there are several Firefox extensions you can use for this), to ascertain the particular polling script PBS is using, and then either examine the script itself to see how it works, or contact its author to find out whether or not people can vote multiple times and whether or not those votes will actually be registered.

Last, who the fuck cares about this? Why would someone be convinced to vote for McCain-Palin because of this "poll"?

I'm not sure rigging the poll back is the right response. But, go to. I guess it ups ad views on PBS, right?

I hear where many of you are coming from. It is dumb to consider this test scientific in any way, it isn't. It bears no resemblance to the opinions of real people at all. I understand that.

However, what I think many of you fail to understand is this: just because you understand how polls work doesn't mean everyone does! Moreover, many people will simply not think about the results as much as you have.

In my mind, the typical scenario for this goes down like this:

1. A person will receive a link in their email: "Hey check it out, even libs think Palin is qualified"
2. Click. They see 75 yes, 22 no.
3. They close their window and don't think about it consciously at all.
4. Later on they eavesdrop on a conversation: "I heard even liberals think she's well qualified"
5. On their way home they hear Rush or Hannity talking about how she's more qualified than Obama.
6. Over the dinner table they are now repeating that line.

So some of that is not within our control, that's true. Since when is that a reason not to fight back? And sure, this person will only be able to affect the thinking of maybe ten people. But if you don't believe in the effect an individual has on a group, why do you vote?

5. On their way home they hear Rush or Hannity talking about how she's more qualified than Obama.

Good grief. How many Sean and Rush listeners are still unsure of where they stand on the issue of Sarah Palin's readiness? Are we really so desperate that we have to rely on the truthfulness of these two bozos in order to win the election? That's basically what you're arguing.

Even if the vote on this poll miraculously swung 70-30 against her readiness, do you really think that would change any of the monologue from Rush or Sean that is going to follow in the next few weeks? No, of course not. They have a script and they're sticking to it, and they'll twist and distort anything out there to make it fit. Let them continue to marginalize themselves without our help.

Operation CHAOS