Manipulation suspected in Bersih poll

(The Star) – PETALING JAYA: On Monday evening, The Star Online put up a poll on the proposed Bersih 2.0 rally on July 9.

The poll asked respondents for their opinion: should it be cancelled, or should it be allowed to go on.

In less than a day, it drew more than a million responses which caused the team to suspect that the results were being manipulated. The Star Online polls attract an average of not more than 30,000 responses over several days.

Furthermore, the total number of unique visitors to The Star Online is about 400,000 per day, lending further credence to our suspicion that there was manipulation afoot.

This could be done in several ways, for example through scripted routines or “bots” that come in to a site to perform the same task over multiple repetitions. Indeed, an initial examination of our site logs showed about one million submissions to the poll page from just one IP address.

Therefore, acting upon the belief that the poll results were tainted, we made the decision to take it offline just before noon Tuesday.

We regret that our effort to give the public a voice has been tainted by this act.