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June 02, 2006, 02:31 PM ET
Voting Early and (Really) Often
When Doonesbury held an online poll to determine where one of the strip's characters, Alex, would go to college, students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did what one might expect of them: They used their computer skills to rig the competition.
The scheme worked, and to the chagrin of the other institutions in the running for Alex's enrollment, Garry Trudeau's not complaining.
The poll, which closed last week, pitted MIT against two other tech-savvy institutions -- Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Cornell University. Students at both MIT and RPI quickly devised their own digital ballot-stuffing systems, but MIT's -- a Web site that allowed visitors to rack up more than a million votes in a single night -- carried the day. (Cornell, which opted for the comparatively quaint practice of encouraging alumni to vote, finished a distant third.)
Doonesbury's Web gurus weren't fooled by the cyber-chicanery, but they weren't bothered by it, either. According to the comic strip's Web site:
A careful check of the applicable rulebook indicates that queering the results was not specifically prohibited. And by tradition, engineers, hackers, and techfolk will assume that in a problem-solving situation of this nature, there is no box out of which they are not expected to climb.... Ms. Doonesbury will be attending MIT.
But all is not lost for Cornell. In recognition of its electoral ethics, the university received Doonesbury's Straw Poll Congeniality Award. (Editor & Publisher)
Categories: Student-Life
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