Hitwise's Election 2008 Data Center, complete with RSS Feeds, has some mighty interesting data today showing which presidential candidates are leading and lagging in the "web race."
Hitwise notes that Barack Obama is leading online, based on traffic to his website, but of course he's trailing Hillary Clinton in the polls by a significant margin. On the GOP side, Ron Paul is doing great online - he's leading the GOP field and also leading all Democrats but Obama and Clinton. And yet, as AdAge.com puts it, "Paul hasn't broken the 3% mark in any reliable poll dealing with the Republican primary. And by reliable, I mean polls in which Ron Paul supporters can't vote on the internet 6,000 times each."
Fred Thompson's recently revamped pre-campaign website is not on the list of sites Hitwise is currently tracking.
Hitwise spotlights a significant truth: Web traffic ain't votes.
It's always interesting to watch a website libel a Presidential candidates supporters.
As a Ron Paul supporter, on the Drudge Website, I emailed Matt Drudge and informed him the Poll he was running for the Iowa debates could be skewed. Someone need only delete the cookie from their browser to vote repeatedly.
I have done the same thing on different polls on the internet because I want to ensure that when online polls are used, sites like this can't complain we are voting multiple times.
A good poll need only use a Perl applet, Real Human verification applet, MySQL database and an IP/DNS address look up to prevent this type poll spamming.
Any competent programmer can create a poll that is so difficult to spam that it wouldn't be worth the time.
A good real human verification applet can use 'Type the appropriate' Alpha Numeric, Straight Alpha, Straight Numeric, or find the correct color(s) in a grid applet or a random mix.
Needless to say, my bet would be that if a website with a proper poll safeguard were implemented that Rep. Ron Paul would still win and by similar margins.
Posted by: Texas Little El | August 8, 2007 2:01 PM | Permalink to Comment