Mrs. Gregoire's1 online poll for the Washington State Quarter design, which was taken down earlier this week after Sound Politics reader Jeff Boly reported that it was being manipulated by a bot, is back online.
Vote for your favorite state quarter design, here. It's now more inconvenient for someone to vote twice from a web browser, but it's still pretty easy to manipulate. Readers D.T. and J.C.W. both e-mailed to explain how cheesy this thing is --
Here's how to hack this poll, too!and
1. Go to http://www.governor.wa.gov/quarter/default.asp
2. Vote for your favorite non-Orca choice.
3. Close the page after you vote
4. From your Start menu, pick Run
5. type CMD and click OK
6. type CD COOKIES-- that's a space between CD and COOKIES
7. type START. (need the period after the word START – no spaces – then hit)
8. Sort the list by date.
9. The most recent entry in the list that you see is the cookie you have to delete to vote again.For example, shark@www.governor.wa[1]txt (your mileage will vary)
10. Bring up Internet Explorer again and return to the governor.wa.gov page
11. Vote again!
12. Lather, rinse, repeat. Keep returning to the "Cookies" window to delete your cookie and fool Queen Christine's page into letting you vote again.
Using Konqueror, my Linux browser, I told it to accept the first cookie only. That allowed me to vote. I rejected the second cookie, the one to indicate that I voted. I got the screen thanking me for having voted, and by clicking the "back" button, I could repeat this againI'm not suggesting that anybody should do this. Why even bother? I'm only pointing that this poll is too easy to manipulate and its results should be taken with a giant grain of salt.
and again. I could also vote multiple times by using multiple browsers, though that took longer to do than the first approach.Fully automating this scam would be trivial. I wonder how much we paid to put
this "improved" poll up?
1) A lot of people in large address translated envrions such as corporations with firewalls, and even homes with cheap SOHO firewalls won't be able to allow legitimate individuals on their own PCs to vote. And 2) it still might make for some noticeable abuse of the poll as it is being conducted, which will further cast the pollsters as inept.
You missing the real agenda.
This is the first test of online voting, to be rolled out for '08.
I can see it all now.
Queen wins re-election by landslide:
Defeats Rossi by 30 million votes.
Republicans cry fraud!
Democrats say count every vote!
Denron says no evidence of fraud charge.
KCE finds 10 million votes on a server!
Judges Bridges rules unless a bot testifies that it voted illegaly and who it cast the votes for, the votes counts.
I believe that the web server logs should be available for public inspection. You should at least be able to tell which IP addresses were responsible for multiple votes.
Bear in mind though that some corporate networks, government agencies and large ISPs (e.g. AOL) proxy all web traffic through a small number of IP addresses.
Posted by: Stefan Sharkansky on April 13, 2006 10:43 AMMaybe that is how Chrissy is going to get the Tribes to ban smoking... "I gave you the state coin, now, pretty please make your casios non-smoking."
Ha!
Posted by: fdshsdjk on April 13, 2006 11:21 AMWe will post the results of the poll on May 1, 2006.
Will the "votes" from King County be the last to be "counted" this time?
I guess we'll just have to wait and see what's inside the black box.
Does anyone know which design is Gregoire's favorite?
1. goto http://www.governor.wa.gov/quarter/default.asp
2. Vote for your favorite non-Orca choice.
3. Go back to previous page by pressing Back button.
4. Bring up Internet Options dialog (Tools --> Internet Options menu)
5. Press Delete Cookies button and exit out of Internet Options dialog.
6. Repeat #2 through #6.
so this is how it feels to be a gregoire voter.
Posted by: dan on April 13, 2006 12:52 PMWait, #2 is your argument usually. What's going on?
Posted by: LovinUSA on April 13, 2006 12:52 PMI usally agree with you, but I really like the Orca/Native design! I lived in Alaska for a few years, and I don't think very many people outside of us in washington think of Fish & Washington...outside of the pike place market throwers.
But the PNW is well known for our Native ties and culture.
Posted by: Josh on April 13, 2006 02:04 PMTo mouth-breathers, morons, and moonbats that is....
Posted by: alphabet soup on April 13, 2006 02:06 PMEven better, IP addresses are not tied to physical addresses. What would prevent, say, everybody in Germany from deciding what our quarter should be?
Posted by: Jeannette on April 13, 2006 02:22 PMIf they log the IP address of my computer, I can only vote once? How will my web designer and expat friends make their voice heard? Oh the horror!
I should really put something about this in my next column, I could start writing right now, but I am terribly upset by all this and think I need to seek comfort from Ben & Jerry's.
Posted by: Joel on April 13, 2006 02:58 PMThey went through a similar process in California though the public had twenty choices on the online poll not just three. Like the system now in use here you could vote multiple times by deleting the cookie.
After the poll ended Gray Davis did not select the ones that the public chose. He even placed the one that finished sixth in the list of the final five, it featured an image the the "naturalist" John Muir and was heavily lobbied for by the Sierra Club and other environmentalist groups. It had been designed and submitted by a Sierra Club member.
When the time arrived to choose the final design Schwarzenegger was then Governor and along with manipulation and advocacy from the State Librarian he was persuaded to select the Muir design. It was widely speculated that Schwarzenegger was trying to curry favor with said environmental groups when he chose their design.
Obviously it wouldn't be too big of a leap to assume that Mrs G will be doing the same regarding the native tribes. Unlike Arnie who attempts to ingratiate himself with everyone except his own base, she has been doing a bang up job of repaying those that arranged for her to "win" her election.
Posted by: Mark on April 13, 2006 04:26 PMGregoire will probably try to trade her choice for the Indian tribes to ban smoking in their tribal gaming buildings (ca*ino is a banned word). Of course she would chose the coin and they would renege on the agreement.
Welcome to online voting. The planning for this vote was probably not done by their best technicians or planners. However, when the fake votes showed up they probably ran for the "experts" and the PR people. Just about any method of online voting can be manipulated.
I even voted for my dog and 3 cats. They're people too... at least to me.
Posted by: Janet on April 13, 2006 07:35 PMWhaddayouswant,it's a two-bit poll.
Forgetaboutit
Posted by: Joey bag of doughnuts on April 13, 2006 09:12 PM@echo off
set NUM_VOTES=0
:vote_loop
sleep 1
set /A NUM_VOTES=%NUM_VOTES%+1
echo Sending vote number %NUM_VOTES%...
curl --form design=1 --output NUL --referer http://www.governor.wa.gov/quarter/default.asp --user-agent "The_Vote_Balancer" http://www.governor.wa.gov/quarter/results.asp
echo ...complete.
goto vote_loop
So how does the web designer defeat your program?
Posted by: alphabet soup on April 15, 2006 10:02 AM