While reading through the comment thread on GOPBloggers.org (where they removed Ron Paul from the poll citing “spam”) who should I come across but the brilliant libertarian political philosopher (or, as Rush Limbaugh describes him, “….a little-known philosopher, Libertarian”) Per Bylund. I’m going to quote his post in full here because GOP Bloggers are too technologically challenged to have permalinks in their comment thread. The rest of the thread is well worth reading as well. Here’s Per Bylund’s post in its entirety:

Let me first say that I do not endorse Paul, or any other republican for that matter. But I like to follow the political discussion.

I find the update to this poll rather extraordinary. Since I have been a web systems developer for many years, I find these “how to make sure hits are real people” things rather fascinating.

It seems this is especially a problem in online polls, which is why most poll engines include one or many technologies to make sure “one man – one vote” is enforced. This is often done through e.g. placing cookies on the surfer’s computer hard disk drive or through keeping a list of IP addresses (the latter is not really possible to get around), but there are a number of these techniques.

Thus, following my interest I have followed the links to other blog posts and articles that supposedly explains the spamming of Ron Paul followers. But no matter how many links I follow it seems there is no real explanation. I even found and read through the 10-point list of sites that are claimed to violate the Digg rules.

If someone is really spamming the poll it is easy to find proof of it being so. Anyone who is not a complete computer illiterate should be able to find enough such proofs within an hour or two to be able to show – beyond any reasonable doubt – that there is spamming (or tampering with the poll) going on.

But there is nothing like this available. Not anywhere! I’ve even googled for such evidence, since I understand it is often claimed that Ron Paul followers are especially computer savvy and know how to tamper with online polls. But I couldn’t find anything.

I did however find a lot of accusations and comments on that the polls “obviously” must have been tampered with. But that doesn’t really prove anything, does it? Since it is so easy to prove someone’s been spamming a poll (and trust me, it is) how come nobody seems to have done this?

The claims in this blog post update are based on a complete misunderstanding of spamming. Spam doesn’t mean a lot of people are involved, it means a great volume is coming from the same source. Spam is thus the exact opposite of people telling others there is a poll and that they should partake in it.

I see no problem with people linking from one web site to another (which is really what we’re talking about here!), that is what we call “WWW” or the World Wide Web – it is a web because it is based on hyperlink technology. If a poll is interesting for some reason people will link to it – all kinds of people will. Ron Paul supporters will surely link to such a poll, as will supporters of Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney or whoever. Does having a lot of people linking to the poll automatically make you a spam source? Does linking to a poll mean you violate the implicit rules of the poll? I don’t see why.

I would suggest a bullet proof strategy: if you don’t want people on the Internet to link to this poll and tell other people about it using digital means of communication, then don’t do it on a web site. The web is all about linking and using digital means of communication to distribute information – to communicate.

I’m beginning to think the Ron Paul conspiracy theorists (you find quite a few of them when googling ‘Ron Paul’, ‘poll’ and ’spam’) are really on to something. After all, no one has been able to supply any evidence that Paul’s supporters are spamming or tampering with the online polls. But a lot of people are complaining that Ron Paul gets “too many votes.” Concluding that this “must” be a result of organized spamming seems a bit childish, or perhaps even stupid. It is at least ignorant of what the Internet is about.

Posted by: Per Bylund at August 29, 2007 07:34 PM