what do you know, the hot chick won.

Congrats Ms. Keibler, that's quite a victory!

Now, I certainly voted for her, and I'm glad she won, but those are some extraordinary numbers. I mean... 442,000? I'm not complaining, mind you, I'm just sayin'...

We decide to call it a celebrity "smackdown" and then everyone acts surprised when a former pro wrestler wins.

Congratulations, Stacy. You and your 42-inch legs have a special place in our hearts.

Someone has a voting program or way too much time

I like Stacy, but... I smell a conspiracy! Baltimore Sun administrators, I think I have a job in Afghanistan for you...

I love me some Stacy Keibler, but this is absurd. Furthermore, the conductor of the BSO finished second? Someone must have a BSO blog that has roughly 1/3 the readership of Kevin's.

Marin Alsop????? Should have been 100% to 0%.

DAMN!

Now, I'm not complaining at all, but why is it that when I went to the Finals page, it showed Marin Alsop with 538K votes to Stacy's 442K? Just wondering. Here is the link http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/bal-smackdown-finalround,1,6112646.poll

By the way...THANK YOU guys for changing the voting procedure and having people type in the codes as it was quite obvious that there was a certain someone (N.A.) who was using some sort of 'bot' to get the amount of votes that he was getting. Wish you would've had that in place before the contest started...the results may have been different.

RESPONSE FROM KE: I will investigate. Obviously some funny business going on after the voting was closed. Alsop gained like 400,000 votes; the other seven participants got none.

Those who find Marin Alsop as an unlikely second in the contest have no clue as to what happens in the real world. Ms. Alsop is known on three continents; Keibler who? Daughter of a cookie baron?

I find Stacy to be an unlikely first. I mean, seriously.. Michael Phelps and Kal Ripken?

Obviously Marin Alsop didn't get this many real votes, but anyone who thinks Stacy Keibler got 442831 legitimate votes is really gullible. There were obviously bots pumping the votes for both candidates.

But what's the real issue here? Who's really at fault here? KE says he'll "investigate it", but he's obviously pretending the real problem doesn't exist. What's the real problem? It's him, and it's the Baltimore Sun. For running this thing and then pretending that it was even remotely legitimate. You guys knew both Stacy and Marin were getting fake votes, so you added the captcha to try to block further fake votes. If you cared even the slightest about doing this right you would have realized your system was broken and vulnerable to spoofs, and you would have both fixed the system AND started the entire thing over.

But you didn't do that. You went for the quick fix, added the captcha on top of what you knew were already completely bogus results, and then you blogged about this and let Stacy Keibler get all this great attention over a poll that was known all along to be broken and inaccurate.

The reality is that the person who pushed Marin to #1 didn't do it to make Marin win, it was done to point out how ridiculous this poll was, and how unprofessional it was for you to even post its results as if they reflected any kind of reality. Obviously the reason to change the score at the end was to prove beyond a doubt how broken the system was from the beginning.

RESPONSE FROM KE: I had absolutely nothing to do with the poll as far as how the voting was done. Anyone who knows me would tell you that being computer savvy is not one of my strengths. In fact, I had nothing to do with the contest at all -- it wasn't my department. Alll I did was write about the results that involved Stacy because she was a wrestling figure. As far as people cheating or what not, I don't know enough about how that works, but I'm sure it could happen
Beyond all that, it was just a silly popularity contest that was supposed to be fun and nothing more than that. Good God, you're going on like we're talking about a presidential election. Take deep breaths. No one should be losing sleep over the validity of the Baltimore Celebrity Smackdown.

Okay, I apologize for suggesting that you had anything to do with it. I thought of that later and felt kind of bad for saying that in my previous message. It just seemed so obvious for most of the final round that both Keibler and Alsop were getting forged results, so I was surprised that you posted the results at all.

But I do think you should tell whoever runs these things that they should enforce a captcha all the time. And that they should fix their code so that when the poll closes it stops accepting votes. :)

Nobody is losing sleep over it, but it's kind of annoying that she's getting any amount of press/PR/interviews over something that's beyond any doubt completely bogus.

RESPONSE FROM KE: No problem. And you are right that precautions should have been taken to prevent the voting being compromised.