Are Ron Paul Supporters Hurting His Chance?
There has been a lot of talk on conservative blogs recently of Ron Paul supporters spamming internet polls in an effort to artificially inflate his perceived support. Before getting into the details of this, I would first like to say, I am a moderate fan on Ron Paul’s. He is the only candidate we have seen in quite sometime who believes in being a strict constitutionalist. He supports doing away with the Federal Reserve, the IRS, the Department of Education, and many other forms of government bureaucracy. That being said I must admit, like most other conservatives, I was not happy to hear his implication that America was to blame for the attacks of September 11 because of our involvement in the middle east.
Immediately following the debate, this was the one statement that stood out above all others, with many proclaiming Rudy Giuliani the winner of the debate simply because he was the first to respond. Over the course of the last few days I have read many different opinions of the debate from conservative bloggers on who actually won the debate. Many say it was Giuliani, others made a case for Mitt Romney or Duncan Hunter. What I did not see while reading the approximate 30 conservative blogs I will visit throughout the course of a week was one declaring Ron Paul the winner of the Republican debate on May 15.
This morning however I happened to look at the poll on my blog asking readers to vote on who they believe won the debate, and surprisingly Ron Paul had over 70% of the vote. Now my blog is called Constitutionally Right, so it is very possible 70 percent of my readers would be supporters of someone like Ron Paul.
On the other hand, the charges of spamming coming from such conservative giants as Little Green Footballs made me second guess myself.
I decided to look into where the traffic to my blog has been coming from recently to see if there may have been a ploy to inflate these numbers, of if they were legitimate hits. What I found was I received a number of hits from Ron Paul Press Hub almost identical to the number of votes Ron Paul received in the poll (I actually received more hits than Dr. Paul had votes).
Now to be fair, I do not consider this to be “cheating”, this websites intentions are to alert followers when new polls are available. This is however against the principles of polling. When I add a new poll to my website, I am doing so to judge my readers opinions on certain issues. By having supporters of Ron Paul’s visit my website simply to place a vote for him and never to return, defeats that purpose.
What supporters of Ron Paul’s are doing is alienating a large block of conservatives by artificially inflating these poll results. By spamming these websites and drawing the ire of the person running the poll because he/she feels the results are not accurate, they are hurting Ron Paul’s chances.
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I must admit that I am one of the voters in your poll. I also admit I found your site via ronpaulpresshub.com. I had never heard of it before. I visited soley to vote in the poll.
I can understand your qualms about this type of voting, too. But I think that there is at least one positive result that you might not realize: I have stayed to browse your site!
With the vast number of sites on the web nowadays, it is near impossible to find all of those which conform to one’s personal philosophy. It actually continually astonishes me that a much as I surf the web, I come across new sites nearly daily.
With a name like ‘Constituional Right’, you would think that a libertarian republican like myself would have run across it long ago. You might get more new readers than you can anticipate simply from the free publicity.
Another issue is that to the average Ron Paul supporter like myself–i.e., one who does not have a couple of million dollars laying around–just what are we supposed to do to raise voter awareness? The hostile media both on the right and on the left, leaves us few options.
To those other Ron Paul ’spammers’ out there, if you do more than just come to vote, leave a comment here!
Maybe, just maybe, one of those Oil Tycoons in TX, will boost Ron Paul’s efforts. This guy is real!
Ron Paul said the opposite about 9/11, you should learn to listen to his words better. He said that foreign policy was to blame and NOT the American public.
Oct 12th, 2007 at 5:35 pm
[…] in May I wrote an article regarding Ron Paul supports spamming polls at different websites, including mine. I stated at the time that it may prove to be harmful to Dr. […]