Vote-rigging surfaces in online City Council poll

Rules broken to gain entry to popular Candidates Gone Wild event

By Nick Budnick

The Portland Tribune, Apr 7, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (26 Reader comments)

It’s not quite Watergate, but one has to call it something: Cookiegate?

It appears that supporters for several City Council candidates — or the candidates themselves — have attempted to rig the vote to qualify for “Candidates Gone Wild,” the combination debate/game show sponsored by Willamette Week and the Oregon Bus Project.

Hundreds of fraudulent votes have been cast in an online poll by removing the computer’s website“cookie” after each vote. The poll in question determines which candidates will be invited to participate in the April 28 event. The controversy has centered around one race, for the seat being vacated by mayoral candidate Sam Adams.

Depending on the race, only the top two or three vote-getters in the online poll will be invited to the event. One computer, one vote, was the rule posted on the www.candidatesgonewild.com Web site.

Contacted about the rumors circulating about the poll, Willamette Week editor Mark Zusman recently confirmed that “vote fraud” had occurred.

He said that early in the voting, the computer whiz hired to manage the events site detected some irregularities in the voting patterns, and realized that someone had figured out how to remove the internet “cookies” thus enabling multiple votes.

Cookies are automatically generated internet markers that can tell a website whether a computer had visited there before.

“There was a spike in the voting for one candidate,” Zusman said, adding that the company “in fact did find that someone was gaming the system. The good thing is we can detect it and remove the votes.”

He added that several hundred bogus votes have been cast in all, saying,“I guess I should take it as a compliment that people want to be in Candidates Gone Wild bad enough that they are trying to (game the system).”

News of the vote-rigging has been circulating among the event’s organizing committee as well as candidates’ supporters.

The campaign of Charles Lewis was among the first to notice odd voting patterns on the site. In a March 19 e-mail to an event organizer with the Oregon Bus Project, Lewis aide Jake Oliver wrote that “A candidate in our race made an unprecedented climb from fifth in the balloting to first in a very short period of time.This candidate's vote total has remained static since building a comfortable lead.”

Contacted by the Portland Tribune, Lewis said the spike in question was in John Branam’s totals, and included a boost of 150 votes in 25 minutes. He said that the poll’s tallies have continued to fluctuate oddly.

“Either an overzealous supporter or the campaigns themselves have fraudulently voted — and that’s ridiculous,” Lewis said. “I don’t want to accuse anybody of anything, but it’s just pretty darn suspicious that this keeps happening.”

Sources confirmed Lewis’ observation that the initial “spike” in voting was cast on behalf of Branam, and that Branam has been the chief recipient of bogus votes. Later, a lesser number of bogus votes were cast for two other candidates in that race, Lewis and Amanda Fritz.

Most of the votes in the initial spike for Branam were cast from just two computers, both located in San Francisco.

Branam is from San Francisco originally, and his campaign manager, Phil Busse, used to work in San Francisco as a lawyer. However, Branam and Busse said they have no idea who had engaged in the vote-rigging.

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