Unfortunately, we have found some questionable voting. We checked only the top 3 categories in all the polls (there were over 10,000 votes for just those!) – and found several questionable votes. Whether this was intentional or someone did not understand the 5 votes per network rule is not known. There were also blocks of votes that needed to be examined by an IT expert, so we emailed them to him for his expert opinion. It seems that some of our voters were breaking the 5 votes per network rules as there were a large number of portable device votes that were from the same device at different hot-spots in the same town. We are adjusting the final results and removing the disqualified votes from the totals before releasing our winner list.
Sadly, some of the apparent winners from the unofficial closing poll tally will not be the official winners once the list is made public tomorrow. I know that those of you who may be in that position most likely will be surprised that your well-meaning friends/family broke the contest rules. We are sorry this will be the outcome, and that is in no way a reflection on you as a nominee.
Next year we will be adding a registration for voters to prevent this from happening again. For the rest of you who are just waiting on the news, we are sorry for the delay… but we wanted to make things fair and square.
Come back tomorrow for the final list and make sure to email us if your name is on it! You have 14 days to get us your email address so we can get it to the prize awarders. We will be doing a drawing for the prizes once we get everyone’s information.
Thanks again for your continued patience as we sort the details out!
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Sorry that you are having to deal with this headache! When I had a portrait photography business, I had this happen once with an online voting. All of the headaches and worry that it caused me factored in when I decided to close my business (among a whole lot of other things). So — just know that I’m thinking of you guys as you wade through the results!
Thank you for trying to restore the integrity of the voting process. We appreciate your hard work!
Ouch, this is a real pain in the you know where! So sorry you’re all having to go through all this hassle, what a bother.
Oh, brother.
Some people…
Thanks for all of your hard work, I know this is disappointing.
Thank you guys for all your work, & so sorry you have to wade through all the problems!
Thank you ladies for all of the work you put in to have these awards each year! I love finding new blogs to explore via the HSBA! I am so sorry that there is cheating and the headache it has caused!
Thanks for all the hard work… hope these issues haven’t sucked the fun out of the awards for you.
Can’t wait to see the results!
I do hope you can come up with a better system. I have ten people in my house and we couldn’t all vote. My friend’s daughter voted for me, then she couldn’t vote too, because it would only let one vote through from her computer. I had several people tell me they couldn’t vote at all for some reason!
Oh, well, it was fun anyway, and I think I got a few new readers for my blog. Another idea would be if there was some way that the same blogs wouldn’t be in same order all the time. I imagine a lot of people just checked out the few of the top ones and made a decision. I bet there is a program that could “shuffle them.” Hey, maybe I can get my computer geek son to come up with something!
Also, if we didn’t know who was winning it would be more suspenseful. Again, people might only check out those who would win anyway.
Have a good one and thanks for doing this. It was fun, even if I am a LOSER!!! LOL
I’m so sorry that you have to deal with this. I guess we don’t life in a perfect world afterall! Right along the lines of parents doing the AWANA Grand Prix cars for their 6 year olds so they can win the trophies. Goodness.
Well, I still think this is a great idea and a lot of fun. I met a lot of new people while blog-hopping and my son got really interested in working on his site when he saw that more than just his sister and I voted for him!
A little motivation!!!
Have a blessed week, ladies!
I hate that this is creating so much work for all y’all, and that people are so dishonest.
I’m also frustrated that they could/would cheat, when, like Diane, we couldn’t even all vote- not even five of us. Once one of us had voted, the rest of us couldn’t.
Someone twittered “Hanging chads at HSBA!”
Thought it was cute- thanks for all your hard work!
That is sad! Very sad!
Just being nominated, to me, is honor enough! To actually blatantly cheat in order to win is just plain wrong.
Sorry you’re having to deal with all this extra stress. That is disheartening.
Stopped by to see this year’s winners. I’m sorry that you are still having trouble with cheating…..it’s an incredible service you offer the homeschool community.
That happened on a photo contest I was in a couple months ago… there’s no way the person that beat me in the last couple hours got sooooo many votes legitimately.
Glad you are “fixing” the mistakes on yours!
Thanks for your kind comments everyone. It has been a long awards season, but certainly not the worst in the three years we have done this. We’re still honing the process and love all your suggestions. Next year we will most likely NOT show results so that there is less temptation to cheat… and we will most likely NOT allow anonymous voting. We’re still working on a way we can limit IP/Network duplicates without preventing some networks from hosing up entirely. In my house, we were only able to vote once. At my library we were only able to vote once, too – and my daughter couldn’t vote at ALL on the Funniest category (sorry Carrie!). We have 4 people at home and were only able to get 3 votes out this year.
We all do hope to make the process easier next year. Your suggestions are great – keep them coming.
I am SO sorry to hear about this. Thank you so much for working so hard to keep this a fun event!!!!
I hate that y’all are having extra work to do, too.
I would like to suggest that the blog owners have no control over how their readers vote. I know that no one in my house would think of cheating, but I can’t speak for my readers. I would hope they would be honest, but apparently, judging from this post some readers somewhere aren’t.
I just hope whoever was at the top and ends up not winning won’t be automatically seen as cheating.
Nope, Connie, we addressed that in the post. Just as we have no control over who wins, the winners have no control over who votes for them.
This has been a lot of work. Extra work. We really don’t want to disqualify any of the votes. Problem is that some people voted multiple times (much more than the 5) from the same device. We want everyone to have a fair shot, and, honestly, these are fun, but they are just the blog awards. I feel bad for anyone whose well-meaning friends voted more than they should have and made it appear that anyone won, but, personally, I think you ALL are winners.
We got to vote 3 times at our home. We have 8 in our family who are capable of voting. We don’t get 1 vote per person either, even if we get our 5. And our library only allowed us one too. Go figure. I know that there are some really great blogs that many don’t have a chance to visit. I am looking forward to checking them out as I can.
Elena… hanging chads… I restrained myself from using that term throughout this process. :LOL:
blessings everyone!
~J
I too am so sorry this has been more difficult that you all anticipated. I’m glad, Jacque, that you again addressed that it isn’t necessarily the nominated blog owners that cheated.
) I have had the blessing to know. I’m sure it would break their hearts to think that somebody cheated “for” them.
, so many seem to have been used to bless and encourage me just when I needed it.
Just from the blogs on the list that I have read, many of them are some of the dearest most godly ladies (not to exclude the men…I just haven’t really read any blogs written by men
And while we “bloggers” know many of our readers and have become wonderful friends, blogs (unless private) are open to anybody. Maybe it wasn’t even somebodys “friend” wanting to help them win but rather just somebody who either wanted to just “do something funny” just to do it or cause trouble. We just don’t know.
But, like Connie, I wanted to comment to that because while I read the first post here on HSBA about the cheating and was happy that it was pointed out the blog owners would most likely be very surprised if their winning blog didn’t win, from some comments and posts I’ve come upon the past couple days, it seems many are assuming it is the blog owners that cheated. We just need to be so careful not to judge unknowingly.
Thank you HSBA team for all your hard work. My favorite thing about your site, like many others, is just the many wonderful blogs that I have found. While with soon to be 12 little ones, I don’t have much time to read them
Thank you.
love,
Jaynee