Spammers for Stein

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Spammers for Stein

An overwhelming number of students support Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein — at least that’s what The Collegian’s straw poll results reported after it was spammed Tuesday.

Mike Brinkman, information technology specialist business services associate for Hillsdale College, said one unknown individual broke through the online poll’s one-vote restriction to cast hundreds of votes for Stein.

“I downloaded the survey results for the second survey and looked at the ones marked as spam and then filtered for the Jill Green responses,” Brinkman said. “There were 406 from the same IP address. Since it records the latitude and longitude, it appears to be a residence in Osseo.”

Osseo, less than seven miles from campus, was geographically the closest location that could be determined via the IP address.

The Collegian hoped the poll would allow students to express their preferred presidential candidates in an organized fashion, but after seeing the majority of 1,000 entries were for a presidential candidate who, as of Tuesday, was polling at 4 percent nationally, according to Quinnipiac, the editorial staff decided not to run the results.

“Many students were excited for the results of the poll and were rooting for their candidate,” Editor-in-Chief Thomas Novelly said. “It’s a shame that we couldn’t print the results because someone decided to hijack the survey. We plan to have even more safeguards for future polls.”

Dean of Men Aaron Petersen said while the violation may have seemed harmless, it could be a violation of the Honor Code.

“I suppose this sort of thing could be viewed as a violation of the Regulations for Proper Student Conduct, specifically items one and two,” Petersen said. “At a minimum, it would be good if the individual who caused The Collegian staff this trouble were to circle back to them and make things right.”

The Collegian plans to run a new poll soon.