brainwagon

Let’s face it: I’m not Canadian, so I don’t really care about hockey. But still, I found the following story to be both amusing and thought provoking, and i suspect that similar situations can occur in baseball (a sport that non-Canadians enjoy) so I’ll comment briefly.

All-Star games are odd things because they take place between players who the fans select by voting. In the past, ballots were usually distributed by the league, and collected. In recent years, it has been popular to use the Internet to allow fans to vote.

So, we now have a popularity contest decided by vote, where essentially everyone can vote as often as they like, where the marginal cost in terms of times and resources is exceedingly low, and where automation of voting is a very real problem.

What could possibly go wrong?

[tags]NHL All-Star Game,Rorygate[/tags]

Addendum: Check out the entry under “Stuffing the ballot box” to see how the 1957 Major League All-Star voting worked out.