Frauddetected in Bird of Year voting
First it was the Russians interfering in the US election, now voting irregularities have been uncovered in the Bird of the Year contest.
The voter fraud was detected by Wellington-based statistical analysts Dragonfly Data Science, which has also run programmes to track votes in real elections in this country, the US and Britain.
Scientist Yvan Richard, who was running the programme, noticed a big spike in votes for the white-faced heron around midnight after the first day of voting on Monday. There was also another smaller spike around 11am on Tuesday.
Altogether 112 votes were found to have come from the one IP address, somewhere in the Christchurch area.
The white-faced heron fan used a random email generator, so all the votes came from different email addresses, Bird of the Year co-ordinator Kimberley Collins said.
The rule was only one vote per person, so all but one vote from the offending IP address had been deleted.
‘‘We’re not angry. We’re just impressed they were able to do that and they care enough about a bird to do it.’’
Organisers suggested he or she might like to make a donation to Forest & Bird’s Givealittle page Our Native Birds Need You.
Without the dodgy votes, the white-faced heron had just 30 votes early yesterday. The kea leads with 2292 votes. Voting closes on October 23.
It’s not the first time the Bird of the Year has been rocked by dodgy voting. In 2015 15-year-old twin sisters managed to make hundreds of fake emails, which they used to support the ko¯kako.