TexasCHLforum.com

Absolutely, positively, rigged. Perhaps not by the Houston Business Journal, but they aren't tracking IP addresses (which might prevent the issue) and I can absolutely guarantee you someone has rigged a 'bot to vote at automatic, frequent intervals for the "ban" option.

Here's why: I woke up at about 3:00 a.m., checked the Forum, saw this Topic. Looked at the vote: 66% for retail banning. As an experiment, I decided to vote while in no-cookies "stealth" mode, close the browser, then try it once more. In that span of time, at 3:15 a.m., six other votes has been recorded between my first and second.

Let's try it again with counts and time stamps:

03:26:08 - 2994 Total Votes - 66% Ban - 29% Allow
03:27:55 - 3002 Total Votes - 66% Ban - 29% Allow
03:29:14 - 3014 Total Votes - 66% Ban - 29% Allow

So, at 3:30 a.m., I voted three times in three minutes, six seconds. In the same span of time, 17 "people" voted for the "ban" option. Yeah, right. If it hadn't been zero-dark-thirty, I wouldn't have noticed it.

I don't believe there is anything we can do about it; HBJ isn't going to care in the slightest or offer to publish any sort of disclaimer stating that their poll allowed automated, unsupervised voting from the same IP address. But that's what's happening, and the automated voting is all on the anti side. If I were clever enough to rig something myself, I might just try to counter with a 'bot doing the same thing for the "allow" side...unscrupulous, but so is what's happening now.

HBJ has a substantial online presence, a large social media following, and a lot of business subscribers. Then end result here is that all those subscribers and online followers are going to see a totally inaccurate, falsely padded result that is going to make public opinion look as if it's skewed way to the left of the issue...when it is not. This won't help us one bit.

Now up to 3043 votes...