Should Politcalbetting be part of this voting farce?

For five days now we’ve been discouraging individual Politicalbetting supporters from multi-voting in the Guardian Political Blog of the Year contest because we thought that this was wrong and that the paper would take action to stop it.

Since then short-listed sites with a fraction of the user base of Politicalbetting and which attract maybe 1% of the comments that come here have seen dramatic increases in their votes and our relative position has gone down and down from first to fourth place.

Last night the Guardian’s “Backbencher” email bulletin urged readers in a headline to “vote early and vote often” – which suggests that as far as the paper is concerned that multi-voting is acceptable.

The question is do we join this or not?

For to cast as many votes as you want is very simple. All you do is disable cookies on your browser and you can vote to your heart’s content. With the Mozilla Firefox browser you can disable cookies just for voting by going into “tools”, then “options” then “privacy” and click on the “exception” tab.

With Internet Explorer you go into “tools then “options” then “privacy” and finally “advanced” to get to the cookie setting.

But should we go down this road? What do you think?

Be thankful that the Guardian is not running the General Election!

Mike Smithson