Are web based competitions possible?

[Administrator]

Is it possible to hold a fair and accurate web based competition? We often see web based surveys to vote on your favorite components, your favorite vendors, but is it really fair? Can you track unique voters or can these voters defeat the system using IP address spoofing, cookie clearing, services such as Anonymizer, etc.?

Over the years I've been witnessing, in my opinion, cases of fraud in web based competition. Competitions such as the asp.NET Pro readers choice awards for example. Companies that don't belong anywhere near the top are coming out as winners with people being caught red handed such as in the ecommerce category as evangelists on a particular companies forum bragged of their methods to repeat vote, one of which is a web hosting company with numerous assets to defeat such a system. asp.NET Pro claims they have methods in place to defeat such fraud, but as we all know the ASP.NET world, is this really possible? Can a web based competition truly be fair? It is also of interest that competitions such as the asp.NET Pro readers choice awards provide their "winners" discounted advertising. As companies often do, their interest is purely in promoting their own company with follow-up advertising.

State your opinions on this topic as you see results of competitions calculated by web based voting.

 

[cjard]

Yep. Charge their credit card with a 0.01 to cast that vote, then never let that card be used again. In defrauding the vote, a person would actually have to commit credit card fraud; an imprisonalbe offence.

If someone is lucky enough to have 2 credit cards then either:
assess who they are and prevent additional voting
allow the vote; they've paid for the right to cast it
charge them more for repeat voting if it is determined they are the same person using a different card

It's a shame, in a way, that money should have to be used to intervene on something that ought to be regulated by human decency, but one must consider that it is a usable universal regulator