People apparently have strong feelings about the poll published over the last week in the Paulick Report asking readers whether they support or oppose the lawsuit filed by the National Horsemen's Benevolent and Protective Association and state affiliates to stop the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act from being enacted.
We've done polls before on this legislation, asking whether readers were in favor of the Act while it was working its way through Congress and then, following its passage in December 2020, whether the creation of a national office (the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority) for medication and safety regulations will have a positive or negative impact on racing.
All those polls expressed strong support for the legislation.
That's why it was a bit surprising to see what appeared to be overwhelming support (about 60%) from our readers for the HBPA's lawsuit asking a federal court to declare the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act unconstitutional.
A reader pointed out they were able to vote more than one time and suggested that maybe someone supporting the HBPA was “stuffing the ballot box.”
Turns out this person was right.
The software we use to poll readers does collect the IP address for all voters but does not identify them in any other way. It also gives us the option to block any one IP address from voting more than one time. Unfortunately, that box was not checked when this poll was published.
I was able to download and export a file of all votes onto an Excel spreadsheet and sort by IP address. Lo and behold, there were multiple cases of what I would call “extreme voting.” In one case, an IP address was responsible for voting more than 1,000 times. Another voted 500 times. The timestamp on the votes showed some people spent a lot of their daylight hours trying to influence the outcome of this poll.
I went through the document and then back to the voting software and eliminated any multiple votes from the same IP address. In the vast majority of cases, those casting multiple votes were on the side of the HBPA. When all multiple votes were eliminated (no matter which side of the issue they supported), opposition to the HBPA lawsuit came in at 66%, with only 34% supporting the HBPA challenge. This is from a total of 2,230 votes (nearly 1,800 votes from the original 4,000-plus were discovered to be duplicates).
This poll is no longer accepting votes
The funny thing about this attempt to tilt a non-scientific public opinion poll is that it will have absolutely zero bearing on the legal challenge launched by the HBPA. We asked our readers how they felt because many of them are HBPA members or affiliated with other horsemen's organizations (Thoroughbred Horsemen's Associations or Thoroughbred Owners of California).
So why do it? Why sit at a keyboard for hours and vote hundreds of time on a meaningless poll on some horse racing website that has no influence on a federal court in west Texas, where the HBPA lawsuit was filed?
Maybe some people just can't help but cheat.
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