Letter to the Editor: Hillsdale Student

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Letter to the Editor: Hillsdale Student
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A Hillsdale student hacked the Collegian’s presidential poll | Wikimedia

Dear Collegian editors,

I am the person responsible for ruining your Presidential Poll in this week’s edition of the Collegian. I am writing to tell you I am sorry, and that it was not my intent when I began my mischievous endeavor. I really did feel slight surprise (and guilt) when reading your article “Spammers for Stein”. Hopefully by writing this, I can clear my own head and offer you tips to prevent this in the future, as well as vow to refrain myself from participating in future polls .

My intent in voting Jill Stein was to see if I could significantly raise her polling at Hillsdale College just to see her slice of the pie look much larger than her national polling average in the pie charts the Collegian produces every time you do a poll. Maybe it is a sad sort of satisfaction, but I see how it is wrong. I never intended it to vote 400 times, but the whatever the final tally was, the numbers don’t lie.

I’d like to share how I did it. I have run surveys from this program before so I was fully aware that you would be able to see my IP address. I figured that if I did vote a lot, my IP could be excluded from the results when you download all the data, and you could have ran the results anyways. I’m not too familiar with the software, but I thought that would be a safeguard for myself.

It was a similar to how my entire high school was able to vote to be recognized on our local news for a Friday Night Football ‘game of the week’ special. I was kind of encouraged by some friends to see if I could really pull off such a thing here with this straw poll. I left the program running a lot longer than I thought I did, and am sorry to skew your results.

Hopefully this information helps in the future to safeguard against multiple votes in polls, and I will promise not to vote in anything in the future, nor will I share with others how I was able to accomplish this. I am sorry again.

I sincerely apologize,

Hillsdale student