The Guardian have a voting problem (update)

Further to this piece earlier in the week, The Guardian managed to avoid Top Gear winning their poll by The Wire getting even more multiple votes.

"Between the poll launching at about 4pm on Thursday 30 July and closing yesterday, it attracted just under 100,000 unique users, so in theory there should have been a similar number of votes cast.

As you can see from the final poll, there were slightly more than 100,000 votes cast – in total 2,316,575, by my calculation.

Two shows, The Wire and Top Gear, accounted for nearly 90% of the votes. The Wire (1,035,509/44.7%) finished ahead of Top Gear (1,001,096/43.3%) thanks to a late burst of sustained multiple voting between Tuesday and the poll closing at 2pm yesterday.

This after Top Gear had established a seemingly unassailable lead over the weekend with its own burst of multiple voting – by Monday the show had nearly 60% of the votes cast, with around 350,000.

QI (198,400/8.6%) ended up a distant third and the only other show to get more than 0.2% of the vote was The West Wing (33,860/1.5%)."

With multiple voting distorting the fair result, you can see why the Labour party are so keen on electronic voting.