Ron Paul supporters, hackers?

The managing editor for CNBC takes down a poll and accuses Ron Paul supporters of “rigging” or hacking it.

It’s trivial to tell if a poll has been manipulated. It’s a lot more likely that supporters simply posted about it in their forums and chats, and had everyone they knew was a supporter hop in and vote. That’s called good organization, and passion. It’s one of the things America really lacks a lot of the time when it comes to politics. Here’s my response to this editor.

If it does turn out to be hacking and we see some convincing proof I’ll apologize. Otherwise I’m just disgusted by the state of our media.

I’ll start by saying I’ve just started hearing of Ron Paul in the past month or so. I’m not a supporter or a detractor.

Now that that’s out of the way, I find what you did childish in the extreme. You essentially took down a poll because you didn’t like the results. I see where you’re coming from, it does seem like his supporters got organized and took advantage of the poll.

But how is that different from coming to a town and drumming up support, helping people get to the real polls to cast their vote?

Now it’d be different if there was hacking or forgery involved, but I have to assume that a corporation as big as yours can easily detect such a simple thing on a web based poll. Which was it? Was it hacking? If so, bad form on them. It seems more likely the case is that Ron Paul has a lot of web user support, and is good at organizing and communicating with them.

If that’s the case then your actions were not only childish, but a disservice to all of your readers and watchers. Please clear up the story and let us know if it was in fact some sort of hacking (actually breaking into your servers to skew the data,) or simply a strong and well organized web community? You may not want to believe it, but that would be reflecting the sentiments of “the many.”

If you really felt that these polls were unscientific and unimportant as you implied… why would you be concerned about taking it down?

I have to feel there’s something else at work here behind your actions, and it frankly puts a bad taste in my mouth. If I don’t hear an update, and I don’t see any proof of hacking, then I won’t be trusting CNBC again.

Sincerely,

Alex Morse

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