Polled out

The Dominion Post is whinging that people skewed their "poll" on John Key's popularity. Allegedly people in Parliamentary Service offices have been multiple voting.

Well boo hoo! Simple answer - stop running unscientific self-selecting polls that are designed to achieve the result the paper is trying to push (not to mention make money from those dumb enough to text vote).

The voting system on Stuff is trivially easy to hack - all you have to do is block the cookie it sends when you vote - you can then watch the votes crank up indefinitely.

Have a look at their current poll on "Has Daniel Radcliffe made the right career move by starring in a raunchy new stage play?" Look at all the votes!

You can do this too - all you need is this little Linux script:

#!/bin/bash
i="0"
while [ $i -lt 1000 ]
do
wget http://www.stuff.co.nz/view-poll-results.html?section_id=1860&poll_id=14455&option_id=22228
i=$[$i+1]
done

Take a copy - drive pseudo-polling out of New Zealand!