Rick Astley rocks MTV's vote, leads poll by 20 million

Astley in Singapore, August 2008. (Photo by flickr user Chinnian) 

HOLD THE PHONE: There's something confusing happening here. MTV's post appears to be referring to the poll about whether Astley should be in the contest, and not the contest itself.  This is perplexing, given that we haven't heard anything about a campaign to game this mini-poll, let alone one that's already generated 20 million votes.  I am attempting to untangle this sordid mess, so please standby.

CORRECTION (4:40pm): Indeed, I had the wrong number.  The 20 million votes MTV cited were in reference to voting on the 'does he deserve it' poll, not the "Best Act Ever" contest--although both have been bot-driven.  As to the contest voting itself, MTV has not released numbers, but Mark Lancaster of bestactever.com, the site leading the automatic charge in the main contest, says there are now "26-27 million confirmed votes" from the RickVoter bot, plus another 4 million from people who sent in screen shots of tallies from home-brewed bots.  Meaning a likely 30+ million Astley votes for the contest so far.  What we don't know is what kind of lead that gives Astley, especially given that Tokio Hotel fans have apparently 'bot in' to the game as well.

ORIGINAL POST:

According to MTV UK, '80s pop-rock legend Rick Astley has clocked in 99.98% of the 20 million votes cast, eking out the narrowest of victories over his competitors in the Best Act Ever competition. 

So I was fudging the headline: Astley didn't actually capture all 20 million of the poll's total votes, just 19,996,000. That leaves a cache of 4,000 votes for Britney, Christina, Green Day, Tokio Hotel and U2 to apportion among themselves.

MTV Europe, huffing cheekily on the smoke of a memefire it set a few days ago, is now polling voters on the all-important meta question of whether Astley deserves "to be in the same category of those great aritsts" or not. This is a new level of inanity, given that the site was the one that decided to put Astley -- a write-in candidate -- on the ballet in the first place.

But, as Alexa shows, the Astley hijinks are paying dividends for MTV UK -- the site's traffic is spiking (independent of all the phony requests), suggesting that MTV may have a legitimate culture coup on their hands. 

The site has also shown a sense of humor about the vote fixing. At one point site administrators shot back at ballot stuffers by redirecting auto-vote attempts to a video of Astley singing "Never Gonna Give You Up," effectively ReverseRickRolling hundreds of people.

Aussie Mark "Vote4Rick" Lancaster, the brains behind bestactever.com , may be surprised to hear that MTV is touting the 20-million number*. In an e-mail exchange last night, Lancaster guessed that only about 8 million of the RickVoter's automated vote attempts had gone through, though he added that home-brewed vote-bots may have added significantly to the tally:

"They haven't bothered to put in a delay of any form and this has begun to overload MTV's servers," he wrote -- and indeed, MTV's site appeared to be intermittently troubled yesterday. "To help slow this down, we've increased the artificial delay in our scripts so that we're doing voting slower. We want Rick to win, but we don't want to destroy MTV's bandwidth in the process."

What a guy, right?

A representative from MTVE has not answered communications about the Astley voting, and we don't know if they've contacted the reclusive Astley about appearing on the EMAs in the event that his election is ruled legitimate.

The conspiracy theorist in me thinks that if he agrees to go on the show, the election will stand, and if he turns it down, MTV will rule that our votes didn't count. And that would be a major run-around, letdown and desertion.

-- David Sarno

* see note at the top

Related:

Oops, I voted for Rick Astley 961 times
Rick Astley's MTV Award Hacked, With Pleasure [Wired]
Web Scout's March interview with Rick Astley (includes audio)
MTV to fans: Is Rick Astley the 'Best Act Ever'?

Comments

[Sarah]

Oh, I see the problem. That 99.98% stat is about the poll, not the Best Act Ever voting.

[Rick's Mum]

Yeah...I don't think they're releasing details of the current vote tally.

http://www.petitiononline.com/2893025/petition.html

[Uncle Ian]

I'm old enough to remember having a lot of fun listening to Rick Astley's music when it was first released. And now, twenty years later, I'm having a blast with it all over again- and so are millions of others. Rick Astley has become a phenomenon for the second time two decades later, and I don't think any other eighties pop stars can make anywhere near the same claim.

Rick Astley seems to have a fine, humble sense of humour about what is happening to his "Never Gonna Give You Up" song right now. I hope that he'd be happy to accept victory and receive this well-deserved award, and give an enthusiastic performance at the show- with a nod and a wink, joining us all in this one big final Rick Roll.

Astley has a brilliant voice and sang numerous hits- I wish he hadn't stopped recording.

[chrisgee]

YOU'VE ALL BEEN "RICK-POLL ROLLED!" He never gave us up,he never said goodbye...

[Sarah]

"given that Tokio Hotel fans have apparently 'bot in' to the game as well"

Careful with that. There are viruses being spread under the guise of Tokio Hotel auto-voters, the less computer savvy TH-fans are getting taken:

http://www.tokiohotelamerica.com/2008/10/09/tokio-hotel-fans-dont-be-fooled-by-autovoters/

[Will]

Don't worry Rick. We're never going give you up, and we're most certainly never going to let you down.

[Sara]

Wow, it's sad how many people have used the same pun over and over again.

Astley should be disqualified from the Awards, considering just how underhand his voters have been.

Tokio Hotel fans haven't been using auto-voters; they tried, but the links only contained viruses from Astley fans.

Wow, he must be proud to be able to say he has such fans!!!