Hey guys!

An important reminder (since we ran into this problem today ) that only FoLCs may vote in the Kerth Awards.

As specified in the FAQ, getting your husband, wife, mom, dad, sister, brother, neighbour, cat and goldfish to vote for your story is considered ballot stuffing. As a result, we discard every suspicious vote.

Extreme stuffing might even bring us to disqualify a story, and we'd hate for that to happen.

Please take a moment to re-read the FAQ on the Kerth website. The rules are important and ensure the competition remains fair.

Kaethel
Kerth Awards Coordinator

That's too bad. Always distressing when odd voting occurs.

But how do you determine who is a folc? How do you know that the voter is not an Archive addict who has never bothered to register on either these mbs, Zooms mbs or the fanfic listserv?

Or is this one of those tracing it back to a shared computer thing that is beyond the ken of techno-peasants like me?

What about two folcs in the same family? Or a couple folcs at the same workplace (not that a folc would ever do fanfic stuff at work - never , ever, of course)

c.

I'm not on K-Com, Carol, but I know that Kae has just gone to bed so won't be able to answer your question until tomorrow. For the sake of anyone who's reading and worrying that their vote might get discarded just because they share a house or communal computer facilities with another FoLC, I think there's nothing to worry about.

As far as I recall from the general answer K-Com gave the last time we had an incident of ballot-stuffing, suspicions get raised by a combination of circumstances, including but not limited to IP addresses. They didn't want to state what these circumstances are, quite reasonably, because that might actually present a cheat with ways to circumvent detection.

I also remember Erin saying that where there's doubt, as opposed to pretty clear-cut evidence, K-Com will contact the voter to clarify the circumstances.

I'm sure someone from K-Com will give an official answer in due course, but I hope this will reassure you in the meantime.


Wendy

The presumption is always that a vote is genuine, whether the email address is familiar or not, unless something about it is dodgy. As Wendy says, we prefer not to spell out the red flags, but there are a few. And the policy was always to contact the voter if there were questions about the vote. Most of the time it's something innocent and explainable, but every once in a while, people do try to cheat.

I've never quite understood why. It's not as if we're doing cash prizes or anything.

PJ

Thanks for the explanation, guys. I don't totally understand, but understand a bit more .

It seems odd, doesn't it. Could be some troll looking to do a bit of sabotage or just some kid sibling wanting to be supportive?

c.

Pam and Wendy have already answered your question, Carol, and yes, indeed, there has to be a combination of signs for us wave the red flags. Identical IP addresses is one of those signs but certainly not the only one, and I hope you all understand why we don't want to reveal what other circumstances can make us suspicious.

Don't worry - we're never ditching votes without being certain they're an attempt at ballot stuffing. Sometimes (and that's the case this time around) it's a case of people not being aware of the rules. Other times it can unfortunately be more malignous, but thank goodness that's pretty rare.

All we want to do is make sure the competition remains fair. Any rejected ballot has their sender warned as well - we don't do things behind people's back so no worry there.

We're trying to do our job as best as we can and, as said earlier, part of the job is to ensure that no cheating is involved.

Kaethel
Kerth Coordinator

Ah, but the glory lasts forever, doesn't it?