Oops, I voted for Rick Astley 961 times

Wasting no time in getting their man elected "Best Act Ever," the large and mostly anonymous under-culture of Rick Astley fans has already deployed a device to defraud the voting on MTV Europe's website. 

The "RickVoter" is a very basic utility that simply navigates to MTV's voting page and votes for Astley...over and over and over. 

MTV most likely didn't bother to build a big security wall to defend against this kind of ballot stuffing, but it seems clear that having left the contest open to being tinkered with, they essentially guaranteed a win for Astley.

Why do I say this? Consider the following anecdote. I loaded the RickVoter to test it out, curious if it actually did what it said it would. But after looking at it for a couple of minutes, I got distracted by a few phone calls and e-mails. By the time I got back to my experiment a half-hour later, I saw that it had been busily voting the entire time, and I had registered my support for Astley 961 votes. Er, my bad?

I would beg for MTV's forgiveness for contributing to the fixing of this election, but there's no real point. If even a few dozen people have left the RickVoter on all night long, then Astley no doubt has hundreds of thousands, or millions, of votes, and 961 is barely a drop in the pond.

The question now is whether MTV will consider the results valid or if they'll throw them out because of the irregularities here. One could easily argue that they invited this kind of mischief by putting Astley on the ballot in the first place and that pleading ignorance to the perils of malwebolence should not be a defense in this case. But I still think that if they're smart they'll just declare Astley the winner, get him on the show, and take a shower in the ratings windfall that would follow. 

ADDED: From Digg commenter Nat3r:  "i had about 100 tabs of bestactever.com open when this first happened, with 5 votes every two second... meaning every two seconds i would vote 500 times...i left it on for 17 hours."  You do the math...

— David Sarno

Related:

Web Scout's March interview with Rick Astley (includes audio)
MTV to fans: Is Rick Astley the 'Best Act Ever'?

Comments

[Karl]

I only voted once. Just because some people are abusing the system doesn't mean all of our votes should be disqualified.

For all you know, they are tracking votes by IP address & allowing only on per IP.

[Cmdrfred]

Dont worry about MTV getting cheated with the votes, they got Norton.

[Anonymous]

If Rick Astley does not win this, I swear to my existence I will never turn MTV on again in my life.

[digger]

http://digg.com/celebrity/MTV_never_contacted_Astley_about_EMA_nomination

[Rick Cain]

Rick will never be a tired meme. He will outlast all of us. When I grow old and too frail to use a computer I will feel a certain comfort that my children will continue RickRolling others for years to come.

[Jim Kettler]

OVER 9000 times!!!!!!!!!!!
OVER 9000!!!!!!!!

[Hans Burckhard]

Rick HAS to win

why?

cause I ALONE voted over 1 million times for Rick he must have over 1 billion votes if we consider the huge amount of people who vote for him EVERY DAY

RICK WE LOVE YOU GREETINGS FROM GERMANY