The Sports Corner

Another NHL All-Star voting conspiracy

It started with the San Jose scandal, followed a few years later by Rorygate.

Now, another NHL all-star fan voting scam has brought more shame to this interactive ballot.

It’s been one week since the vote for the All-Star game’s starting lineup began, and already, the true colour of the fans are showing. This time around, it’s blue, red and white - the hues of the Canadiens logo.

According to the recent ballot leaderboard, all six Habs are leading the Eastern Conference in votes, and not just by a slim margin.

Alex Kovalev, Saku Koivu and Alex Tanguay are dominating the forwards category as all three have over 200,000 votes each. In fourth place? Sidney Crosby with 100,000+.

On defense, Andrei Markov and Mike Komisarek are also gaining a major lead with over 200,000 votes each, while the third place player on that list is Mike Green with 71,000+. The story is the same in goal as Carey Price’s 220,000+ tallies are nearly five times more then second place Marc-Andre Fleury’s 53,000+.

It’s obvious something’s going on.

The main message from Habs fans is clear: “It’s the 100th anniversary of the franchise, and we want all six Habs to represent the East in Montreal, where the All-Star game is being hosted.” But the main culprit behind this whole scheme?

Well, that’s simple. Voting bots. Apparently, a certain script known as “greasemonkey” has been a big part of the problem (or solution depending on where your loyalty lies) as the instructions to run this program has been posted up on Montreal forums.

This means that votes will keep adding onto these Canadien’s totals 24/7, as these automated scripts have found yet another flaw in this voting system.

As of this past weekend, the NHL has addressed some of this ballot stuffing by removing 20,000 votes from Kovalev and Markov, but that solves nothing. They have also added a confirmation code meant to stop bots but if history has taught us anything, it’s that this didn’t stop fans from manually voting for Rory Fitzpatrick.

If the tallies happen to even out by the end of the week, then there’s no doubt the NHL will have played around with the votes - which defeats the purpose of this online ballot.

Sure, fans have up until January 2 to vote and try and get others to catch up to the Habs. But the damage is done.

So why has the league still not learned its lessons from the years before?

To eliminate this problem, they can easily implement a one vote per IP address. This can be worked around by some computer geeks but for the general public, most are too lazy to find ways to change their IP in order to vote again for their favourite players. 

Same can go for one vote per email address, which might be a better way to do it.

But the reason this is not implemented is most likely due to the fact that the NHL will be embarrassed to actually find out how many - or how little - fans they have. The more votes they can get - which means multiple voting - the better for them.

Every year that this issue doesn’t get addressed, the same problem will continue to arise and the All-Star fan voting will always be a joke.

For now, we’ll just have to deal with watching the Habs take on the Red Wings and Roberto Luongo when the puck gets dropped at the NHL All-Star game on January 25 in Montreal.