Now, you might have noticed some irregularities with the short story voting (as the Carter Center might describe it), noting that one team led the voting for most of the poll. We, however, noticed the irregularities early on in another way (about 2-1/2 days into the poll). We noted that someone had registered three sock puppet users for the sole purpose of voting for one team in the poll (we have the log history, IP address matches and poll sequence [even the database doesn't match poll votes directly to users]) so these three users were deleted this afternoon shortly after the poll closed to ensure the same wasn't repeated. In the end we were pleased that this produced a tie. Both stories were good and didn't require cheating to advance their cause.
Note to the wise - don't try to circumvent the system when the admins are root. It was a clumsy try that was easily detected! It's not a shared server, we installed and configured the software, built the site and we have root on the database and the incremental backups of the DB in a form that should stand up to formal legal scrutiny. We try to log everything just in case. So fair play (as Ponder asked nicely for) from now on.
