All Votes Are In

Could that not just be two citizens who happen to know each other in RL?

Edit: and if there are possible reasons why the votes could still be valid, shouldn't we just stop there and accept the vote rather than pry into the whys and wherefores? I mean unless one knows fraud has occured it seems improper to decipher everyones secret ballot, just to determine so.

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FYI, Digi and I would have voted from the same IP address. She's my RL fiance and we've been sharing a router for years

Hope that isn't the confusion your having...

I do not know that for a fact. It is based solely on IP address. This is why I hoped someone would come forward and email me so I don't have to back out the name to just ask them. There's a good chance this could be nothing, however it is my duty to look into it.

There's also a separate issue of where someone was able to vote twice using the same avatar! This person should have received two receipts. I was hoping they would come forward as well to describe their method for voting twice. After much testing, I could not duplicate the procedure.

~Ulrika~

It very well could be. Please email me your IP address if it's static, if not just the domain name will do. If they match we can call the election now.

Edit: I just reread your post. Logically speaking it must be you since there was only a single duplicate IP address and you did confirm a vote from the same IP address. There's no need to send me anything, I'll post the results of the election as soon as Battlestar Galactica is over.

~Ulrika~

Now if the person who managed to submit two votes could just help me out ...

~Ulrika~

As you can see above, that was exactly the case.

It's my job as the head of the SC to implement and monitor this election. As someone who is entrusted with developing the code, implementing the election, and providing the results, I cannot afford to do anything less than the absolute best. Our reputation as a democracy and the legitimacy of the RA depends on it.

You can bake me a cake later.

~Ulrika~

I'm a bit confused about "alt voting", this is definitely not clear to me. I'm assuming that this statement assumes different votes from different avatars coming from the same IP address?

I never assume that people logging in from the same IP address are simply alts from each other - that is rarely a "binding" definition. They may very well be different, legitimate citizens, sharing their connection. Roomies, partners, couples, family and friends, often share their Internet connection while logging in to SL.

I can only give my own example. Every day, due to my personal schedule, I log in from three different locations - and there is only one where I have a "fixed" IP address (my workplace in the afternoons). On all the others there are many people sharing the connection - in the mornings, up to 8 people may be logged to SL at the same time; in the evenings, usually just 2. None are alts from each other, but separate accounts.

To confuse matters more, some of these people share credit cards (better: generated virtual credit cards, a practical system I subscribe to, that reduces Internet fraud - your real card number is safely hidden away when you shop on the Internet, you just get a valid virtual number from Visa for one-shot transactions). This means that my roomie and her boss often use my credit card when updating their accounts More complex than that, I even have access to some avatars that are not linked to any credit card at all (yes, yes, surprise, surprise) but use a different method for paying Linden Lab. To make things worse, I do really have an alt for testing purposes - Sandra Fatale, avatar key 34cf15e7-de77-445c-b323-4f2745f8e402 - which I seldom use except for doing some tests (Sudane may well remember those ). So I guess that people trying to track me down will have a wonderful time doing so. They'll probably reach the conclusion that I have something close to 40-50 alts and use perhaps 80 or so different credit cards, log in from 12 different locations regularly with my own account (assuming that all of those had a fixed IP address, which they haven't, but a good tracker will see the geographical distribution of those locations, and probably figure out that these 40-50 avatars always come from the same 12 places) and that I am really a fast typer on up to 8 simultaneous connections Worse still, I'm clearly insane, since I have the habit of talking to myself very often and for many hours.

Clearly, the theory that "these two people share the same IP so they are alts" is too simplistic. To the best of my knowledge, none of those 40-50 people are currently Neualtenburg residents (Moon Adamant, my roomie, used to be a member in the Anzere days, but she doesn't own a share in the "current incarnation" of Neyaltenburg - I'm pretty sure of it, since she always gets my credit card for paying her few Internet bills, and she hasn't done so lately ) So, I'd assume that among the 17 residents, eventually some share connections, or at least shared those connections during the election procedure, or they are really alts from each other, but own deeds in Neualtenburg separately, and thus, each alt is a rightful citizen - which is more than fine.

Anyway, like Sudane clearly put, I don't see a problem with alts voting. After all, either the booth works for everybody, or it just works for the list of current citizens. In the first case, well, I can see that there is an educational process in watching that amazing procedure actually work, and I never disagreed with non-citizens being allowed to test it out for themselves. But I always assumed that there was a simple, clean, and elegant way of knowing which votes count, and which don't - after all, the valid citizen list is publicly posted on our website, and I assumed that the booth "knew" who was a valid citizen before sending the vote to the website.

So, if by "alt voting" something else is meant, I'd like a clarification, please.

Oops, I just read the rest of the thread after posting (forums are really dynamic these days!). So, that one is cleared - two valid citizens voting from the same location

For the record, I didn't get two voting receipts, so I guess I just voted once

Well, it's theoretically possible for someone to buy two seperate shares, under two seperate accounts, solely for the purpose of stacking the vote.

On the other hand, short of demanding verifiable RL information, we can't do much more than check for IP addresses. While this is an unreliable method, I don't disagree with the basic idea that such situations should be checked - they just shouldn't be taken as evidence of alt voting without further investigation - which Ulrika did, and Satchmo explained.

(Also for the record, I have two alts, used only for the purpose of forming my land group, and to allow me to play both teams in Portal Wars. *grin* Although I now must confess I have a terrible temptation to make alts and stick them in every faction as they come up and vote against each other. I'm weird like that.)

Absolutely not! I did not take this as proof of alt voting, I took it as an evidence of alt voting. This is why I asked the individuals to contact me so that I could investigate further. The mention of a possible future true fraud charge was used to motivate those who might be engaging in fraudulent voting to come forward during the investigation phase.

When no one came forward I slowly provided more information (slowly to protect privacy as much as I could) until suddenly the investigation provided insight. Upon clarification, the investigation ended, the election was called, and I posted the results all within 15 minutes.


Nowhere in my posts did I claim I had proof of alt voting rather I claimed I had evidence of it. Check for yourself and then meet me back here with my cake.

~Ulrika~