There has been a bit of a debate for some time as to whether individual bloggers should be able to cast more than one vote for participants in the Weblog Showcase.
Up until now, I’ve defaulted to saying that yes, multiple votes can be cast, as long as there is no obvious intent for abuse. The theory was that if a blogger really does mention the candidate post two or three times on their blog, then it means they feel stronger about the merit of the post than another blogger who only provides a single token link.
Well guess what: y’all have now convinced me otherwise, given today’s Showcase rankings:
Irreconcilable Musings: 210 votes
Hell for Halliburton: 73 votes
If it isn’t obvious, the vast majority of those votes were duplicates cast by a handful of bloggers. So, I’ve decided to implement filtering so that each blog can only have one vote per candidate count. Folks are free to link to the candidates as much as they want, of course, but it won’t change the vote counts for the Showcase. The code is already implemented and the current stats now reflect this change. (And to be clear, an individual blogger may still cast votes for multiple different candidate blogs — this is still not just permitted, but encouraged.)
Normally I don’t change the contest rules mid-week, but this was ridiculous, so everyone can feel free to get annoyed at me if they like.
And by the way: yo, Axis and Alliance members! The League of Liberals is kicking your conservative butts.