On JAKIM Cheating on Online Poll Results

Tim wrote a post on his blog in which he claims to have found proof of JAKIM doctoring their own website’s poll on caning as a form of punishment. To translate, the poll asks “Is it proper for Muslim men and woman who commit the offences of drinking liquor and illicit sexual intercourse to receive the whipping sentence, in accordance to syariah criminal law?” The choices are “Proper” or “Not Proper.”

Tim was kind enough to furnish me the results of his script’s data (655 small HTML pages of the poll’s results page saved every 2 minutes) which I manually tabulated into 10 minute slices in Excel to obtain the number of votes every 10 minutes.

I immediately found that there are cheating on both sides of the poll, which shouldn’t surprise anyone really. Cookie deletion or IP anonymizers should be able to circumvent the poll’s one vote policy. Despite this, although I wouldn’t think of this as conclusive proof, I find Tim’s conclusions highly likely – 500 vote jumps on the “Proper” side happening three times is just a little too neat, even for people spamming votes.

It’s not hard to throw out the few slices of two minutes that contain obvious vote spamming on both sides of the poll. And the ‘real’ results of the poll, which is what I’m most interested in, is damning.

With spamming votes removed, between 11:30 a.m. on 9 March and 11:10 a.m. on 10 March, there are approximately:

• 54 votes for “Proper”, vs
• 604 votes for “Not Proper”

Click to enlarge, full analysis in link below

Check out the analysis for yourself. The orange bits are the ones I decided are anomalous / cheated votes).

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