Update on the AFA Poll

Update on that AFA poll—they’re remov­ing chunks of votes for options they did­n’t like. Oh yeah, dis­hon­esty is SUCH a love­ly “fam­i­ly value!”

Edit: I emailed the AFA, and received this reply:
Cynthia,

Your mes­sage regard­ing the alleged dele­tion of votes in our Mar­riage Poll was for­ward­ed to me. I don’t know if any­one else from AFA has respond­ed to you, but I will be hap­py to.

Here’s the long and short of it. We had some­one from the pro-homo­sex­u­al side of the issue use an auto­mat­ed script that gen­er­at­ed thou­sands of false votes in favor of homo­sex­u­al mar­riage. Cer­tain­ly, we felt it was in the best inter­est of every­one involved, no mat­ter which side of the issue they were on, for these auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­at­ed votes to be delet­ed. And, we have incor­po­rat­ed some tech­nol­o­gy into the poll to pre­vent this from hap­pen­ing again, on either side of the equation.

Cur­rent­ly, the num­bers you see on the poll are from what we believe to be valid sign­ers. We have no inten­tion of skew­ing the poll either way, nor any rea­son to do so. 

I’m sure you under­stand the need to main­tain the integri­ty of the poll. Too bad some­one from the pro-homo­sex­u­al side of the issue felt the need to use such under­hand­ed tactics.

Paul Chaney
Email List Administrator/Online Mar­ket­ing Manager
Amer­i­can Fam­i­ly Association

I replied, offer­ing assis­tance in track­ing the IP address of the per­son using the script. I then received this response:

Yes, we got his IP, and are con­sid­er­ing whether to report this to his ISP. Thanks for your offer though. I appre­ci­ate it.

Edit: I don’t know why, but the edit I’d added to this mes­sage on the 18th was just total­ly gone today (the 19th), so I’m re-adding it.

Yet anoth­er edit on 12/21: Some­one has in fact con­fessed to using a script to add 2700 votes to the poll.