Are There Really Programs That Can Alter These Debate Polls?

And don't the major media outlets have programs to defend against it?

That any hacker worth two cents could come up with something that would work, However, I am sure that the sites do take some precautions and that anything that would really work on a consistent bassis would most likely take more trouble than it would be worth to do.

Like most things with computers there really is not much you can't do if you have the knowledge, resources and persistence needed to see it through.

Have there been polls that have been botted I am sure there are, maybe even some of the polls we go to vote on have been affected. Due to the nature of the poles we can never really know for sure.

But when it comes to things like these the Occam's Razor is best to use. Ask yourself is it more likely that people who frequent internet news sites have a Kerry bias or simply that more people actually think Kerry won the debates, or that some evil Democratic hacker sympathizers bombs the polls with some script/s they wrote up?

Most take the simple way out and try to put a cookie on your machine. If you turn cookies off you can retake the poll. The are special programs (Because Freepers read here I will not tell of the best one I myself used to ah ah add 800,000 votes in a non Political poll :evilgrin:)

A few very few Polls that do IP logging. In IP logging the polling site only allows 1 vote per IP. This one has dial up users hanging up, redialing for a second post at a poll. And most ppl will only do that a couple times.

but it would take a more sophisticated program to rack up tens of thousands of votes...

you mean a 5 line perl program... then yes, there are.

?

there are simple Windows programs that do that.

As for Enders 5 lines of Perl scripts .. All I can say is most Freepers think Perl is something females wear around their necks.... :evilgrin:

I think you'd want to set up a few hundred threads for quicker results.