Did 100,000 NHL All-Star Votes For Rory Fitzpatrick Just Disappear?

When it was announced earlier this week that the Rory Fitzpatrick campaign had failed to get the journeyman defenseman onto the NHL Western Conference All-Star team, I kind of shrugged. After all, it wouldn't be the first write-in campaign that failed in its noble attempt to buck the system. Besides, who in the world would possibly have the time to parse the vote totals?

Well, some noble soul has taken the time, and something really isn't adding up. Over at canspice.org, Brad Cavannagh is looking at the numbers line by line, and I think the NHL has some explaining to do.

Here's the crux of the argument:

Perhaps the most telling statistic is this, the number of votes gained for each position from one reporting period to the next. You’d expect these to be roughly the same, as fans voted for both conferences at the same time. Looking at each conference’s defencemen:

ECD WCD
30-Nov
6-Dec 863,716 879,987 (+/- 16,271 - 0.9% margin)
13-Dec 888,210 893,371 (+/- 5,161 - 0.2% margin)
20-Dec 699,012 700,948 (+/- 1,936 - 0.1% margin)
26-Dec 657,248 554,037 (+/- 103,221 - 8.5% margin)
2-Jan 411,749 407,011 (+/- 4,738 - 0.6% margin)

So somehow between December 20 and 26 over 100,000 votes weren’t reported.

Let’s look at the votes gained between each reporting period for the top Western Conference defencemen (all others received less than 5% of the vote):

Votes Rec'd: 6-Dec 13-Dec 20-Dec 26-Dec 2-Jan
Scott Niedermayer 96,135 60,371 57,474 92,878 51,277
Nicklas Lidstrom 102,584 53,664 56,327 94,981 50,724
Rory Fitzpatrick 113,509 124,229 159,784 58,010 63,335
Chris Pronger 85,187 63,156 58,413 48,401 44,630
Dion Phaneuf 98,401 65,737 42,894 41,495 36,097
Scott Hannan 73,890 168,105 56,748 24,009 20,587

Rory Fitzpatrick’s votes dropped from 159,784 to 58,010 between December 20 and 26, a loss of over 100,000, and at a time when media coverage of the Vote For Rory campaign was at its highest. And strangely enough, over 100,000 votes for Western Conference defencemen weren’t reported for the December 26 release. Rory ended up 23,000 votes behind second place vote-getter Nicklas Lidstrom.

A strange coincidence.

Indeed. The folks at the forums over at Something Awful are batting around some logical explanations as to what happened -- including the league throwing out 100,000 automated votes for Fitzpatrick. I'd like to know what my readers think.

UPDATE: No way the NHL is going to cover this up now. I see that Tyler Dellow and James Mirtle have picked up on this too.

The NHL has some explaining to do.

UPDATE: I've placed several calls to NHL HQ asking about the discrepancy. In particular, I asked if any votes were thrown out, why and who those disallowed votes were cast for. I also asked if votes were disallowed, why didn't the league announce that when they published the complete vote totals. I've also sent an email to Steve Schmid, asking him what he thinks of all this.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Just got an email from Steve Schmid:

Yep, I was the one that typed up the numbers you used.

Thanks for spreading the word on this. Hopefully the NHL will have an explaination for us.

Me too.

I think Tyler's take deserves some attention:

I don't know what really happened but the whole thing is incredibly suspicious. Now, the real irony is that one of the purported motivations of this whole thing was showing the NHL how dumb internet voting was, as it lets a small group of people manipulate the vote. The NHL did a nice job of of showing them that the system can be fixed. It's tough to have sympathy when people who are showing a purported flaw in the system find out that the flaw isn't quite as big as they think. That said, if you're going to do a vote, you ought to be willing to live with the consequences. It's a little unseemly to sell sponsorship for something like All-Star balloting that leaves voters wondering afterwards if the votes cast were actually counted or if they were only counted if they were for players that Wayne Gretzky thought belonged at the All-Star Game.

Still waiting on some call backs. I'm moving this to the top of the page.

UPDATE: Mirtle links to the fine print in the All-Star rules:

No automatic, programmed or robotic votes will be accepted. The National Hockey League (“Sponsor”) in its sole discretion reserves the right to void any votes that are cast in contravention of these rules or that are designed to compromise the integrity of this Sweepstakes. ...

Any use of robotic, automatic, programmed or like entry methods will void all entries affected by such methods and be deemed tampering. Entry material/data that has been tampered with or altered is void.

That would certainly seem to explain things. Still waiting on a call back from the league.

UPDATE: NHL VP Bill Daly responded to Mirtle at the Globe and Mail's hockey blog:

"There were no changes made to the vote counting process at any point in time from the start of the voting to the end," Daly said. "But there were procedures and safeguards in place from the start to prevent automated or other fraudulent voting methods."

Well, that wasn't terribly illuminating, especially since it doesn't specifically address any of the issues I raised above.

FINAL UPDATE: Jamey Horan from the NHL sent this note in response to my questions:

Thanks for the interest...not sure what "totals" you're referring to that don't seem to add up...but we don't release every single vote for every single player, just the top vote-getters. However, rest assured that no voting for Rory was ever compromised.

I'm going to give the last word to Schmid, Rory's campaign manager, who sent the following to me by email:

If the votes were in fact thrown out due to the Rory Vote-O-Matic, why didn't they just throw out the entire ballots instead of just the Rory votes? Obviously there weren't any safeguards in place because people were using bots for all the players (San Jose's players - look at how their vote totals dropped off), and for that week I know there was a Lidstrom bot floating around. The fact that the votes are only missing from the Western Conference Defensemen shows that it has nothing to do with them throwing votes away due to automated bot voting, because if that was the case they would have chucked the votes for the other 11 players and not given us anything to talk about.

And that, for now, is all.

Eric 03:00 PM

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