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Mirtle: Introducing the Rory Vote-O-Matic

James Mirtle, December 20, 2006 at 10:43 PM EDT

The naive, guileless side of me wanted to believe that the Vote For Rory campaign was founded on something genuine, and that those voting for the journeyman Vancouver Canucks defenceman were doing so because of some higher calling. "Wouldn't it be great to see an everyday player in the game?" they'd think to themselves, expending countless hours voting for their new-found hero.

I should have known, however, that nothing of the sort was taking place. No, the impetus behind Fitzpatrick's rocket up the all-star balloting vote has been nothing more than a clever program that votes for the blueliner.

Over and over — and over again.

Created by Brad Touesnard, a web developer in Vancouver, the program manages to penetrate the NHL's (seemingly) foolproof voting site with the addition of a Firefox plugin that does the hard work for you. Once installed and turned on, the Rory Vote-O-Matic can continue to cast votes unabated, day and night, while also ensuring not to vote for his close competitors.

Score one for the legions of Internet denizens who wanted to see Fitzpatrick in this January's all-star contest; with the Vote-O-Matic on his side, his selection seems all but a lock.

  1. Dan Miller from Courtenay, writes: Dear James,
    Please do not lose faith in the Rory campaign. I have been involved in it since near the beginning. The organized portion of the campaign has strongly denounced programs like the "Vote-O-Matic" since they first started popping up. Unfortunately we cannot control cheating beyond the encouragement of Rory supporters not to give into it. Moderators on the official "Rory thread" on hfboards.com, at the center of this campaign, have gone so far as to block any post recommending any voting assisted by this method.

    I cannot tell you how many votes have been cast using this underhanded method. I can only assure you and your readers that the heart of this campaign is based on using fair and acceptable voting methods. I will also suggest that it is more than likely that Rory is not the only player who has recieved votes from automated programs. I can only base this claim on anomalies noticed in the voting numbers last week.

    I assert, therefore, that the campaign should not be condemned. We have tried to be as honest as possible in our campaign to vote a journeyman into the Allstar game. I know I speak for a vast majority of Rory supporters because I have carefully followed this effort from the beginning. We desperately want Rory to be legitimately voted onto the starting lineup in Dallas. It saddens me and many other people who have worked so hard to attain this goal that it should be marred by the prospect of a few cheaters in the crowd.

    Please understand that we hope that the effort to conduct this campaign in an honest manner has far outpaced any contribution by cheaters. We are still working hard for something we believe in, and continue to strongly condemn cheating of any kind. I personally can only hope that people are aware of the legitimate efforts being put in by many contributers.
    Thank you,
    D.M/WMR/YaK
  2. jordan mearns from Delta, writes: First of all I would like to say that I am fully behind the Vote For Rory campaign and secondly, people like Brad Touesnard are a very small minority. From day one, all of us who are behind the campaign have greatly frowned upon any type of voting machines, bots, whatever you want to call them. One of our mottos is that 3 votes done manually is better than 1000 done with a bot. I can speak for myself and plenty of others when I say that there are A LOT of people voting on the up and up. I've submitted approximately 4500 votes myself since the campain started and none of them were computer assisted, each and every one was done through sitting at the computer for hours and pressing the submit button. I would hate for this campaign to be given a black eye because of one idiot like Mr. Touesnard.

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