Poll Fraud Highlights Why DFA Not Accepted by Peers

It appears that there are no boundaries to the deceit from some supporters of Drug Free Australia(DFA). A recent internet poll that questioned whether DFA have a rightful place on professional lists had to be reset after it was discovered that multiple votes had come from the same IP address. The poll was set up by James from The Australian Drug Blog and asked this simple question:

MicroPoll:

Does Drug Free Australia have a rightful place on the ADCA Update list or other professional lists?

Yes or No?

James posted a link to the poll on the Australian National Council on Drugs (ANCD) ‘Update’ forum and the voting began. The results were immediately against DFA with 90% of participants voting no. Over the next few days it balanced up slightly to about 75% voting no until it hit the 50% mark. It was all downhill from there to about 12% from 433 votes. Somewhat surprised at the results, I discovered that it was possible to make multiple votes and the totals would sometimes jump by 3 or 4 votes within a few seconds. I then alerted James, the poll’s administrator. Further investigations by James did indeed find a problem and he informed the list that he had to reset the poll.

Hi all, A few weeks back I ran a poll on the role DFA play on this list. Over 443 'people' voted, trouble was more than half of them came from the same IP address, and all of them voted one way. In other words, multiple voting from one person occurred in a big way. I've therefore reset the poll and enabled one vote per IP address to stop fraudulent voting. The poll is now available again here: http://www.drugblog.net/2009/02/10/poll-drug-free-australia-on-professional-email-lists/

That was a week ago and here are the results so far as at 17/03/2009 11:00 am: Who does the IP address belong to? No one has come forward and claimed responsibility and James rightfully will not disclose the IP address publicly. Known for their skewing of statistics, cherry picked data and other misleading behaviour, has DFA called on a supporter to make hundreds of votes? Was it actually a DFA member? We don’t know but either way, one or more computers via one IP address has deceitfully and fraudulently voted for over 50% of the total votes, all in favour of DFA. In technical terms, when there are a group of related computer users situated at one location, they usually only use one IP address to the internet and that is shared via a router. The IP address recorded by The Australian Drug Blog could have come from several staff members at one organisation giving the impression it was only one person. Then again, it could have just been one supporter. What we do know is that many other votes supporting DFA were from US based IP addresses which may indicate that a dog whistle went out to help with DFA’s polling. If we remove the 200+ fraudulent votes from the one source, that leaves 200+ votes with more than 50% in support for DFA. With only 64 votes in the new poll vastly against DFA, the first influx of pro DFA votes raises more questions. Were there multiple votes from many different sources? Was a call put out to like minded supporters of DFA in the US? Where are they now? With a new poll now in place and a more realistic number of voters, the true feelings of those involved with the ANCD Update list is clear. 77% of voters do not think DFA have a rightful place on professional lists. Not surprisingly, the only chance of DFA being accepted was through deceit and false information.